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Release of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter v6.3.1

February 23, 2021

Submitted by Hussein SHAFIE, XMLmind Software.

Release of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter v6.3.1

XMLmind XSL-FO Converter Evaluation Edition v6.3.1 can be downloaded from http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/downloadeval.shtml. Professional Edition users, please upgrade using this form: http://www.xmlmind.com/store/download.php.

Enhancements:

  • XMLmind XSL Utility and XMLmind XSL Server: upgraded the following software components:
  • XMLmind XSL Server: added servlet parameter "idXSLTParameterName" for security reasons. This new servlet parameter contains a regular expression matching XSLT parameter names specifying which XSLT parameters are to be checked by XMLmind XSL Server as having values containing syntactically correct XML or HTML IDs.

    The sample web.xml file contained in shipped xslsrv.war specifies "root\-?id" because XSLT parameter "rootid" is implemented by the DocBook XSL Stylesheets and XSLT parameter "root-id" is implemented by the XHTML XSL Stylesheets.

  • All programs which are part of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter are now officially supported on Java™ 15 platforms.
  • All programs which are part of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter are now officially supported on macOS Big Sur (version 11.0), except on Macs having an Apple M1 (ARM-based) processor. Macs having an Apple M1 will be officially supported by XMLmind Software as soon as both a “native” OpenJDK is available for this platform.

Bug fixes:

  • XMLmind XSL-FO Converter engine, RTF, WML and DOCX output formats: starting from MS-Word 2019+, adjacent paragraphs having the same background color and also some extra space between their text lines looked like a sequence of “stripes”.

    In previous versions of MS-Word, these adjacent paragraphs used to look like a single block having specified background color. Is this a change in the behavior of MS-Word starting from version 2019 or is it a bug? We don't know. Anyway, this change had unwanted consequences.

    This bug was caused by the fact that XSL-FO property line-height was always translated to RTF, WML and DOCX as some space between lines having at least a value specified in points. Now, when property line-height is specified as a relative value (e.g."1.2", "120%", "1.2em", "3ex"), it is translated to a multiple of the "Single" line spacing, which seems to fix the bug. Of course, when property line-height is specified as an absolute value (e.g."14pt", "16px"), the bug is still there.

  • XMLmind XSL Utility: when specifying the conversion of an XHTML page, option "Use this CSS stylesheet" did not work.

Possible incompatibilities:

  • As explained above, XSL-FO property line-height is translated to RTF, WML and DOCX differently than in previous versions of the XMLmind XSL-FO Converter engine. Therefore documents created using this version may look slightly different in terms of text line spacing when opened in MS-Word.

What is XMLmind XSL-FO Converter?

XMLmind XSL-FO Converter is an XSL-FO processor similar to Apache FOP, RenderX XEP or Antenna House XSL Formatter, except that it generates RTF, WML, ODT and DOCX file formats rather than PDF.

More importantly, this commercial product comes with a handy desktop application called XMLmind XSL Utility which makes it easy converting DITA, DocBook, XHTML and XSL-FO documents to a variety of formats (PDF, RTF, WML, ODT, DOCX, HTML, EPUB, Web Help, etc).

XMLmind XSL Utility also makes it easy customizing the deliverables it generates (PDF, DOCX, EPUB, Web Help, etc) and this, without modifying configuration files by hand and without prior knowledge of XSLT. See http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/_distrib/xslutil/doc/help/com.xmlmind.xslutil.ConversionEditor.html#customizing_xslt

Home page: http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/

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