Forum News

Prince 7.0 beta 1 released

mikeday
Today we have made the first beta release of Prince 7.0!

Exciting new features in this release include:

- Support for more scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi.
- Support for kerning, ligatures, and other OpenType layout features.
- Improved layout and hyphenation for justified text.

And as always it should run faster and work better than ever before. :D
runpin
Great!

But mikeday, does Prince 7.0 support for multiple documents ( linking multiple files together into one file that can be processed into a single PDF file with Prince)?
mikeday
Yes, you can pass multiple input files on the command-line to produce one PDF output. We haven't yet added support for this to the Java and .NET wrappers, but it would be easy to do so.
runpin
Thanks a lot!
davidp
I've just tried the 7.0 beta. It's awesome! Well done guys.

Is there an easy way to see the differences between 6.0 and 7.0 documentation? I'd like to know in detail what's new / changed.
mikeday
The most detailed list of differences can be seen by scrolling through the items marked "Done" on the roadmap, but we will try to massage that into a more readable set of release notes before the final release. :)
fabpot
I have upgraded to the new version and I have noticed a weird behavior.

Japanese commas (、) and full stops(。) are now converted to Chinese ones.
mikeday
Is Prince using a different font than previously for these characters? What are you specifying for the font-family property for this text?
fabpot
mikeday wrote:
Is Prince using a different font than previously for these characters? What are you specifying for the font-family property for this text?


Yes, with the exact same configuration. I've just changed the version of princexml I use to generate the PDF.

Here is the font declaration:

@font-face {
    font-family: serif;
    src: url("/path/to/Birka.ttf");
}

@font-face {
    font-family: alt-serif;
    src: url("/path/to/sazanami-mincho.ttf");
}

html {
  font-family: serif, alt-serif;
}
mikeday
Redefining the standard "serif" font family is not recommended and may produce unusual behaviour. Can you use a different name, eg. "MySerif" or something like that?
fabpot
mikeday wrote:
Redefining the standard "serif" font family is not recommended and may produce unusual behaviour. Can you use a different name, eg. "MySerif" or something like that?


That fixes the issue.

Thanks a lot for this new version. Now, it works like a charm and fixes a lot of issues I had with the previous version for Japanese texts.
oliof
mikeday wrote:
Redefining the standard "serif" font family is not recommended and may produce unusual behaviour. Can you use a different name, eg. "MySerif" or something like that?


Is that universally applicable, i.e. for latin scripts?
mikeday
In general yes: don't redefine "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace" in your own documents unless You Know What You're Doing, in which case go ahead. You can also modify our definition of these fonts in the fonts.css default style sheet found in lib/prince/style.
NoMoreNicksLeft
And should I take it that things just below the "done" list are in order of priority (the foreignObject element is of particular interest) ?
mikeday
The order is variable and changes depending on what is convenient to do at the time, and how impatient people are for particular features. We haven't really sorted through the post-7.0 stuff yet, as we're focused on getting the release out, so in a week or so when that's done there will be an opportunity to prioritise things.
whit537
Any ETA on Prince 7.0? I'm kind of waiting for it because of this bug:

http://www.princexml.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=2483

Developing with Prince is no fun when it takes 10 minutes to run. ;^)
mikeday
Sorry, we're really close now, all the code is finished and we're ready to create the final builds! :)
syllogism
Out of curiosity, will 7.0 run on PowerPCs on the Mac? Or is it officially Intel only?
mikeday
Intel only, and it requires MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) due to the use of the Core Text API for fonts access.
syllogism
Thanks Mike.
ict4schools
Thanks... Works OK for me.