Announcing BFO Publisher

BFO are very proud to announce a their first new product in 20 years. BFO Publisher is a modern HTML to PDF converter.

Originally planned a rewrite of our Report Generator, we've taken all the feedback we've received from that product and channeled it into this one. Highlights include:

• Standards Compliant. Tested against the same testsuite used by Chrome, Firefox and Safari, BFO Publisher is passing roughly the same proportion of tests as the major browsers.
• Streaming model. XML and HTML are streamed through BFO Publisher for layout, rather than loaded entirely into memory. This allows for enormous files - a million rows in a table? No problem.
• SVG and MathML support. SVG is so critical to the modern web, but has suffered from some sub-standard implementations. We wanted to make sure our SVG support was perfect, and we believe in BFO Publisher it is. BFO Publisher also boasts a complete MathML layout engine, giving us native support for the three syntaxes that make up HTML.
• And of course it builds on our PDF Library to ensure that the PDFs generated by BFO Publisher continue to be fully compliant with PDF/A, PDF/UA and PDF/X, that forms and digital signatures continue to be made in the most compatible way, and that when we make a PDF, we're fast.

Under development for twelve years before initial release, BFO Publisher has been a real labor-of-love for our team. It's relatively easy to build a basic CSS layout engine, and that's what we did with the Report Generator. Building one that follows the specifications exactly turns out to be a much harder proposition. Our published test results speak for themselves, and we promise those numbers are only going one way.

The home page for BFO Publisher will always be publisher.bfo.com. It's very difficult to make something complex appear simple, but we think we've succeeded and we hope you like it.

Existing Report Generator users

If you're a licensee of the Report Generator, don't worry. You've still got a working product and it's still supported. But BFO Publisher can do more than Report Generator will ever be able to, so if you find yourself wanting new layout features, SVG support, or you just really, really want your nested tables to paginate properly, you might want to consider migrating.

Technically, we've anticipated this and there's a section in the userguide for you. We're not sure what demand there will be for this type of migration yet, so please email us at support@bfo.com for any technical questions you have on this aspect.

In terms of Licensing, while BFO Publisher is a different product there will be some sort of special upgrade path available for existing Report Generator users. Please email sales@bfo.com to let us know you're interested