Docentric Toolkit 5.1 released

Dec - 5 - 2017 By Jure Leskovec News and Releases 0 Comments

We have just release a new version of Docentric Toolkit. It has been a while since the last major public release. This version brings a lot of improvements in terms of new features and also existing features improvements such as better PDF rendering fidelity and various improvements in the Add-In for MS Word.

Much better HTML support

The new release features a completely new HTML engine which provides a much more complete HTML parsing and conversion from HTML to any of the supported output formats. The new HTML engine now supports many tags and their features that were previously simply ignored.

We also added support for CSS and full CSS style resolution. An HTML fragment that is inserted into a generating document can also define CSS styles and HTML tags can select them.

Consider the following HTML fragment that gets inserted in the generated document using a Sub Document tagging element:

<style>
	h1 {
		color: #5577ff;
		font-size: 36pt;
		margin-top: 10pt;
		margin-bottom: 10pt;
	}

	p.small-text {
		color: #cccccc;
		font-size: 10pt;
	}
</style>

<h1 style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;">Some title</h1>
<p>Some <u>normal</u> text.</p>
<p class="small-text">This is disclaimer</p>
<img src="https://www.docentric.com/content/images/logo.png" />

<br />

<ul style="list-style-type: circle">
	<li>
		Level 1, Item 1
		<ul style="list-style-type: square">
			<li>Level 2, Item 1</li>
			<li>Level 2, Item 2</li>
			<li>
				Level 2, Item 3
				<ul style="list-style-type: disc">
					<li>Level 3, Item 1</li>
					<li>Level 3, Item 2</li>
					<li>Level 3, Item 3</li>
				</ul>
			</li>
		</ul>
	</li>
</ul>

<style>

h1 {

color: #5577ff;

font-size: 36pt;

margin-top: 10pt;

margin-bottom: 10pt;

}

p.small-text {

color: #cccccc;

font-size: 10pt;

}

</style>

<h1 style="margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;">Some title</h1>

<p>Some <u>normal</u> text.</p>

<p class="small-text">This is disclaimer</p>

<br />

<li>

Level 1, Item 1

<li>Level 2, Item 1</li>

<li>Level 2, Item 2</li>

<li>

Level 2, Item 3

<li>Level 3, Item 1</li>

<li>Level 3, Item 2</li>

<li>Level 3, Item 3</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

</li>

</ul>

The generated document contains the inserted HTML fragment with properly resolved CSS style format values:

Save Progress Tracking

Saving large documents can take a lot of time. If you have ever used Docentric Toolkit’s DOM APIs for conversion of big Word documents to PDF, then you probably know that conversion can last for minutes or even longer.

Some of you asked us to implement a progress notification mechanism that could be used to show users the save progress, for example in the form of a progress bar.

The answer to this requirement is a new event Document.SaveProgressChanged. If you subscribe to this event and then call Document.Save, you will be receiving progress change notifications which you can use, for example, to update a progress bar:

private void GenerateDocument()
{
    Document document = Document.Load(@"c:\InputDocument.docx");
    document.SaveProgressChanged += Document_SaveProgressChanged;
    document.Save(@"c:\ConvertedDocument.pdf");
}

private void Document_SaveProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)
{
	UpdateProgressBar(e.ProgressPercentage);
}

private void GenerateDocument()

{

Document document = Document.Load(@"c:\InputDocument.docx");

document.SaveProgressChanged += Document_SaveProgressChanged;

document.Save(@"c:\ConvertedDocument.pdf");

}

private void Document_SaveProgressChanged(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e)

{

UpdateProgressBar(e.ProgressPercentage);

}

Note that the Document_SaveProgressChanged handler call is not automatically marshaled to the UI thread and must be done in the handler.

Announcing support for .NET Core

It seems that after .NET Core 2.0 has been released .NET Core’s adoption has been increasing with each month. And with each month we are getting more and more requests from developers for adding support for .NET Core.

Currently, you can only use Docentric Toolkit in a .NET Framework projects. But this is going to change very soon. Version 5.1 is most probably the last 5.x version. The next public release will be 6.0 and it will add support for .NET Core.

This announcement is not an empty promise. We have been working on the .NET Core port of Docentric Toolkit for quite some time and now we are almost finished. There is still some way to go, but we are already testing the ported version of Docentric Toolkit in a .NET Core console application.

A public pre-release version will be available soon. If you would be interested in trying it out, please drop us an email, and we will get back to you once the pre-release will be ready.

Docentric Toolkit 5.1 released