Log in / Register

Forum › News

Prince 9 released!

mikeday
We are excited to announce the release of Prince 9, now available for download.

This major new release includes:
  • Full support for HTML5.
  • Faster JavaScript and DOM interfaces.
  • Support for the canvas element.
  • Multiple backgrounds and background gradients.
  • Inline footnotes, and more control over footnote placement.
  • Vertical text layout.
  • A new Windows GUI.
The complete details are available in the release notes.

Thank you once again to all of the people who have tried Prince and given us suggestions and feedback on how we can make it even better! :D

To celebrate the new release, we have some beautiful desktop wallpapers:

thumbnails.jpg

Please find the high-resolution images attached below.
  1. prince9-purple1.jpg‎ 834.3 kB ‎
    Purple wallpaper #1
  2. prince9-purple2.jpg‎ 876.7 kB ‎
    Purple wallpaper #2
  3. prince9-white1.jpg‎ 246.3 kB ‎
    White wallpaper #1
  4. prince9-white2.jpg‎ 273.6 kB ‎
    White wallpaper #2
  5. thumbnails.jpg‎ 108.4 kB ‎
    Thumbnails
conner_bw
Awesome. Congratulations!
henning
Great! Do you know when the Solaris version will be available?

Thanks!
mikeday
Very soon! In fact, here is a fresh package for Solaris 10 (Intel):

prince-9.0-sol10x86-opencsw.tar.gz

This new Prince package links to libraries from the OpenCSW project, which provides a particularly convenient way of installing common open source software.

However, we haven't used this arrangement before, so please let me know if you experience any library compatibility issues with the new Prince package.
henning
Thank you! We are on sparc though. Do you have a sparc version as well?
mikeday
Yes, it will be ready soon.
nda
DocRaptor has been updated to use Prince 9.

You can now choose between prince 7.1, 8.1, or 9 in your account options, and the default for new accounts will be 9.0.

You can also select your prince version at document creation time (docs will be updated to include 9.0 shortly): https://docraptor.com/documentation#api_prince_version

And you can use the new prince9 javascript engine (instead of ours): https://docraptor.com/documentation#api_prince_javascript
DSan
Awesome! Does this mean Prince now supports Highcharts?
mikeday
Sadly, no! We're still working very hard on this, it just didn't quite make release, though many other JavaScript and DOM improvements did. We'll get there eventually. :)
afrisch
Same comment: Awesome! And a similar question: is "flot" now supported?
mikeday
Sorry, but what is "flot"? :)
afrisch
flot is a package to draw charts in Javascript: http://www.flotcharts.org/
mikeday
Ah, I hadn't heard of that one before. It doesn't look like it works out of the box, but we'll do some investigation and see if it's possible.
afrisch
> Ah, I hadn't heard of that one before.

Yes you had :-) (see the email you sent to me on 2012-07-14)

Let us know about what you find out! And keep up the good work!

Edited by afrisch

mikeday
Good point! I'll add it to the roadmap for testing, so I don't forget again. :)

But yes, it looks like flot depends upon the same DOM functions as HighCharts and other libraries, such as getComputedStyle. So once we support these hopefully we can get them all working.
afrisch
Hi Mike,

I'm wondering if you have made any progress w.r.t. supporting flot. We'll be happy to help by testing a development version if you tell us there is a chance that support has improved.

Thanks!
mikeday
Testing the latest Prince build on this basic example, it almost works! The graph is correct, but too small.
afrisch
Ah, this is great news, thanks! We will do some tests and keep you informed.
afrisch
I've tested the same basic example with the latest build of Prince. I don't see anything in the chart on the pdf document (or it's really really small), using Acrobat Reader 11. Note that the box containing the chart is there, it just doesn't show anything. The same pdf also crashes evince (2.30.3), with the following fatal error: "floating point exception" (a division by zero?). Did you apply any special tweak to the original flot example?

Edited by afrisch

mikeday
That's odd. I just run this command:
prince --javascript http://www.flotcharts.org/flot/examples/basic-usage/index.html -o out.pdf

I've attached the resulting PDF. Which Prince build are you running?
  1. out.pdf‎ 36.0 kB
afrisch
Ah, sorry, I forgot --javascript for this test. I confirm I can see a small chart with Acrobat Reader, but the crash with evince is still there (the culprit could very well be evince, and I didn't check with a more recent version of it).
afrisch
I've attached another test file, which looks ok, except that the labels on the y-axis overlap with the axis instead of being written to its left.
  1. test2.html‎ 1.0 kB ‎
    Another test for flot
mikeday
I think these issues come from Prince running JavaScript before layout, so it cannot report accurate sizes and positions via the various DOM properties. We may be able to improve this in the future, without supporting full browser-style reflow. In the meantime, scripts will require some adjustments to work well with Prince, or they can be run in another tool (PhantomJS?) to generate SVG to convert with Prince.
afrisch
Our goal here is to reduce dependencies on other tools and simplify the workflow (currently, we go through wkhtmltox in order to produce bitmaps for charts, and then rewrite the html to refer to these bitmaps). We are not necessarily stuck with the 'flot' package, especially if you tell us that it won't be supported by Prince in the near future. Do you have a recommendation for another js charting package that would be better supported by Prince?
afrisch
FWIW, we decided to follow another direction and produce directly SVG charts from our application. Prince works beautifully on them :-) We now avoid the dependency on both flot and wkhtmltox, which is great.
mikeday
That makes life easier! :D