Year 2020 Docotic.Pdf notices

Updated on December 31, 2020

This page contains all Docotic.Pdf release notices for year 2020.

Visit the Docotic.Pdf page for more information and download links. The full Version History for 2020 releases is also available.

We would appreciate if you let us know about your experience with the library. Your questions and feature suggestions are also welcome. Write us an e-mail or contact us via the support form. We love to hear from our users.

Image compression improvements in Docotic.Pdf 7.4

October 16, 2020

Docotic.Pdf 7.4 is now available on our site and on NuGet.

The new release adds the ability to recompress images with stencil and soft masks. And now it is possible to resize masked images. You now can use the JPEG 2000 compression scheme while resizing images. The new version can compress images with Indexed or Gray color spaces more efficiently. We updated Compress PDF document in .NET and Optimize PDF images in C# and VB.NET sample codes to use latest recommended image optimization approaches.

The new version extracts text faster. We did some important changes to improve in this area. Thanks to some of our customers for sending in great test files!

With Docotic.Pdf 7.4, it is possible to add a timestamp to any digital signature. It is also possible to retrieve and verify embedded timestamps from existing signatures. To illustrate the changes, we added the new Sign PDF document and embed a timestamp in C# and VB.NET sample code. We also updated existing Read PDF signature properties in C# and VB.NET and Verify PDF signature in C# and VB.NET sample codes with the new timestamping-related features.

This release contains bug fixes for processing of L*a*b*, Indexed, and Separation color spaces. And fixes for text measurement, drawing, and extraction. The new version contains other important bug fixes, too.

Fixes for handling of disposable objects in Docotic.Pdf 7.3

September 14, 2020

We released Docotic.Pdf 7.3 on our site and on NuGet.

In this release, we fixed some parts of the library that didn't properly dispose of streams. These are quite important fixes and therefore we recommend everyone to update to the latest version of the library.

With the new release, we are moving closer to our goal of getting rid of System.Drawing and GDI+ dependencies in Docotic.Pdf completely. Starting from version 7.3, the library no longer uses System.Drawing and GDI+ when resizing images, detecting which parts of text are invisible, or processing certain soft mask images. Also, we marked some methods, constructors, and operators that depend on System.Drawing types obsolete. For any now obsolete entity, the library provides another way to achieve the same.

Docotic.Pdf 7.3 can be used from Blazor and from HoloLens projects. After some changes from our side, the corresponding tools can properly process the library.

This release also contains bug fixes for text extraction and drawing (including drawing with some tricky CJK fonts).

Support for more logging platforms in Docotic.Pdf 7.2

July 16, 2020

We have released Docotic.Pdf 7.2 on our site and on NuGet.

Starting from the new release, the library can automatically detect and attach to logging frameworks. NLog, Log4Net, Serilog and Loupe loggers are supported. You don't need to do anything extra, if your solution uses NLog, for example. Docotic.Pdf will output its log messages into the configured loggers. We also added two new samples: Logging with NLog and Logging with log4net to illustrate how it works.

We continue our efforts to get rid of System.Drawing and GDI+ dependencies in Docotic.Pdf completely. Starting from version 7.2, the library no longer uses System.Drawing and GDI+ when saving (extracting) images "as painted". This also improves the quality of the extracted images because there is no more unwanted image scaling. Previously, the images were scaled because of the difference in resolutions between PDF and GDI+ (72 vs. 96 dots per inch).

This release also contains bug fixes for processing of images and parsing of XMP metadata.

Docotic.Pdf 7.1 can compress certain PDFs better. And there are other improvements too.

June 28, 2020

Docotic.Pdf 7.1 is now available on our site and on NuGet.

In this release we added new PdfDocument.ReplaceDuplicateObjects methods. Besides the previous ability to replace duplicate fonts, the new methods can deduplicate non-inline images, color spaces, patterns and shading objects. These methods are useful when you are trying to reduce output file size. New methods give good results for documents, which were incrementally updated or created by a merge of several documents with the same objects.

We also added new signature appearance options. Now it is possible to add an image to a signature. You can also specify the alignment of the text inside a signature. It is possible to hide all the text inside a signature, if you don't need the text.

The new version can save whole PDF files or individual PDF pages as grayscale images. This usually produces smaller images. If you are interested, please take a look at the new ImageCompressionOptions.CreateGrayscaleJpeg, ImageCompressionOptions.CreateGrayscalePng, and ImageCompressionOptions.CreateGrayscaleTiff methods.

There are two breaking changes in version 7.1. One affects the way the library draws glyphs with zero width, and the other is about background and border colors of a control.

This release also contains bug fixes for text and images extraction, drawing of documents, and other areas.

Docotic.Pdf 7.0 with support for digital signatures

May 10, 2020

We have published Docotic.Pdf 7.0 on our site and on NuGet.

The key feature of this release is support for digital signatures. The library can sign new and existing PDF documents. To sign a document, please use one of the PdfDocument.SignAndSave methods. You can create signatures of different types, in different formats, using different digest algorithms. For the complete set of properties, please take a look at the new PdfSigningOptions type.

The library can also verify existing digital signatures. It can verify if digest (hash) is valid, check if a signature contains embedded OCSP or CRL revocation data, or if the signing certificate is revoked. You can also access signing and issuer certificate properties. All this is available via the PdfSignature.Contents property.

We created the Digital signatures group of samples for all new abilities.

Starting from version 7.0, the library no longer uses System.Drawing.Bitmap when drawing images. This and other improvements increase the stability of all ASP.NET applications that perform PDF to image conversion. Also, the library now consumes less memory when drawing PDF documents.

This release also contains bug fixes for text and images extraction, drawing of documents, and for processing of forms and annotations.

New PDF rendering engine in Docotic.Pdf 6.0

March 15, 2020

We have published a new major release of Docotic.Pdf library.

Docotic.Pdf 6.0 brings a new PDF rendering engine that does not depend on System.Drawing.Graphics class. The new engine greatly improves PDF to image conversion in ASP.NET applications and also in Linux and Mac OS environments. This is a major step in "no dependency on System.Drawing" direction. We will continue improving in this area in future releases.

Along with the rendering engine change, we improved PdfPage.Save method. The method now produces 24bpp images instead of 32bpp when background is opaque. In most cases, that leads to smaller output files.

We marked methods of PdfCanvas, PdfDocumentView, and PdfPage that acccept parameters of types from System.Drawing namespace as obsolete. Those methods will be removed in the next release of Docotic.Pdf. For each of the now obsolete methods, there is at least one overload. Please use the overloads instead of the obsolete methods.

There is a change our customers asked us about. In the newest release, we added the PdfTextExtractionOptions.Rectangle property. The property is useful when you want to extract text from only a part of a page.

We changed LicenseManager class so now it is thread-safe. You can use it from multiple threads at the same time. It is still recommended to add all license data at the start of your application. See remarks to the LicenseManager.AddLicenseData method.

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