BFO Publisher 1.3 released

The first release we've done on BFO Publisher for about 10 months adds some new features.

• Templates

  . We've added support for Apache Freemarker and ZTemplates to BFO Publisher, allowing an XML or HTML template to be combined with a data model (in JSON, XML, CBOR etc) and then converted to PDF in one pass. This can even be done with the web-service, sending a JSON data model and a Template and getting back the PDF as a reply. FreeMarker is a fairly popular framework, but complicated. ZPath is a BFO creation, much simpler but still very powerful - and it's bundled with BFO Publisher as of this release. See documentation

• ZUGFeRD / Factur-X Invoices

  can be created using BFO Publisher. Factur-X is a cross-european standard for electronic invoicing, based around an XML file embedded in a PDF/A document. We've developed some free XSLT stylesheets to convert the XML file to HTML, which can then be converted to PDF using BFO Publisher. See documentation

• BFO Graph Embedding

  - We've added support for embedding Graphs generated by our Graph Library to PDFs created by BFO Publisher.

• PDF/UA improvemments

  This release has a lot of improvements for the creation of PDF/UA documents, based on cross-testing with other products and recent clarifications to the specification. It also contains an implementation of PDF/UA-2 which we (BFO is part of the PDF/UA technical working group) sent off for ISO approval for publication in May 2023. We're quite excited by this upcoming release, although can't really say much more until the spec is approved and published. When it is, BFO Publisher will be ready to generator PDF/UA-2 compliant documents.

• Improved Email to PDF conversion

  Although our initial release shipped with code to convert RFC822 formatted email messages to PDF, we've rewritten it in this release to make use of ZTemplates for formatting. This is a huge simplification to the API and allows a great deal more flexibility in formatting - we've been using this to prototype PDF files that work with the evolving EA-PDF specifications, and are very pleased with the approach. See the API Docs for more information on this. This release bundles the APIs required to convert email with the main package, so they can be converted via the web-service (simply convert a file with a media-type of message/rfc822).

• GlobalSign QSS signatures

  . Our support for the GlobalSign signing services continues, with this release adding support for their new "Qualified Signing Service". See our documentation or GlobalSign's documentation for details.

• CSS improvements

  We've added support for the draft Link Parameters spec and for the filter() function. The column-span CSS attribute is finally supported, and there are many, many updates and fixes to layout (in particular to multi-column layout) since the previous release.

Those are the main highlights - see publisher.bfo.com for the download details or check the release notes for more details.