While this release improves PDF and XPS output even further, it also adds some new important features.

Shapes

Extensive support for shapes (Auto Shapes in MS Word) has been added. Now your (template) documents can also contain shapes such as lines or rectangles, and will be properly saved to any of the supported output formats. Of course, this is not only true for document generations and conversions. You also have full programmatic access to shape objects in terms of creation and manipulation.

Form Fields

We added full support for MS Word Form Fields. Form Fields are deprecated since Word 2007 in favor of Content Controls. But we have got quite a lot of requests to add support for them. It looks like many of you either still deal with a lot of old documents containing Form Fields or there are so many that are simply used to use them instead of the new Content Controls.

Word supports three different Form Fields and Docentric Toolkit Object Model supports them all in the form of three separate classes: TextInput, CheckBox and DropDown. Since these classes are part of the DOM, you can use them in various document processing scenarios, including extracting or settingCheckBox.IsChecked values.

PDF/XPS fidelity improvements

We further improved PDF and XPS rendering. This means that the documents that are generated or converted from Word documents to PDF or XPS are rendered with high accuracy compared to PDF documents saved from within MS Word.

Our PDF/XPS rendering algorithm now also honors several properties that were previously ignored (except when saving to DOCX):

• ParagraphFormat.KeepWithNext
• ParagraphFormat.KeepLinesTogether
• TableCellFormat.VerticalAlignment

Like always, we are open to suggestions. Try out the new features and let us know what you think. Don’t hesitate to tell us if you think you have found missing feature we should implement. Remember that all of the features that we develop are the result of your feedbacks!

About the Author

Jure Leskovec