ABCpdf .NET 7

The information on this page relates to an old version of ABCpdf.

Click here for information about the latest version of ABCpdf .NET.

If you want a quick overview you may be interested in the ABCpdf PDF Comparison Chart...

Full support for the XML Paper Specification (XPS). Microsoft XPS provides an alternative for page description and document storage but it is not compatible with the de-facto PDF standard. ABCpdf now supports full interoperability between Adobe PDF and Microsoft XPS. Convert your PDF documents to XPS. Convert your XPS documents to PDF. And our conversion routines are carefully written to preserve the natural structure of your source documents wherever possible. So this means the preservation of color spaces and the preservation or conversion of embedded fonts.

Full support for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Microsoft WPF is the new graphics sub-system developed for .NET 3.0. It comes in both the standard flavor seen on platforms like Windows Vista and also in a lightweight web based system - Silverlight. Of course with a new graphics API drawing to screen a new PDF export facility is needed too. As such ABCpdf now comes with full WPF import capability. See our WPFTable example project for details and examples.

Enhanced Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) support. Our EPS import and export engines have been wonderfully popular. However they abstracted certain elements like fonts and color spaces so that the transition from EPS to PDF might not always be as literal as one might like. For the current release we've completely re-written the EPS import engine to provide a direct translation between EPS and PDF wherever possible. This means that text in your EPS file will end up as text in your PDF document. It means that unusual color spaces in your source EPS files will end up as the same color spaces in your PDF document. At the same time as enhancing EPS import we also enhanced EPS export which now supports multiple color spaces for use with different types of printer. So you can render directly to Grayscale, RGB or CMYK EPS.

Read any document. We've leveraged the power of XPS to allow us to import any document direct into ABCpdf. This means that you can use hundreds of different applications to cope with hundreds of different document formats. So you can now read your Microsoft Office document formats like Word, Excel and PowerPoint either using OpenOffice.org or using Microsoft Office and you can read your HTML documents using ABCpdf or Internet Explorer. Please note that not all applications like being scripted this way and not all support the standard print commands.

Native support for Flash. Yes we wrote our own SWF rendering engine! That means that those lovely smooth graphs you see in Flash stay smooth and resolution independent when you import them into a PDF. And while we were about it we wrote our own Flash export engine so you can convert your PDF documents to native vector Flash.

HTML import has been updated to use our new native Flash import engine. So Flash content in your PDF will appear in your PDF in true vector format. We've made numerous minor changes to our HTML import routines to mesh more closely with current versions of Windows and produce an even more perfect result. And if inconsistencies are detected we try and fix them automatically rather than failing.

What happened to ABCpdf ASP? Well for this version we implemented a new COM layer over the native .NET base - a layer which exactly mimics the interface of ABCpdf ASP. This means you can use one product for your .NET deployment and also for any legacy COM deployment. Think of it as double value - ABCpdf .NET and ABCpdf ASP both in one package. Plus you get the advantages of the .NET architecture behind a COM front end - advantages like native x64 support and features like SVG import.

ABCpdf now generates smaller documents in less time. Our new refactoring code eliminates all fat from your PDF documents. Plus a variety of optimizations both in specific and in general areas have produced great results. Generic architectural changes have realized speed gains of 5-10% across the board. Specific optimizations in areas like remapping and appending have realized speed gains of more than 400%.

PDF rendering has been enhanced and optimized. ABCpdf supports complex structures like Type 4 functions both faster and more accurately. Memory usage for patterns and similar objects has been reduced.

New document-as-image and image-as-document functionality. For some people a TIFF is an image. For some it may be a multi-page fax document format. We now allow you to treat documents as images and images as documents. Everything just behaves that little bit more logically. On a practical everyday level this means that the XImage object now accepts file types like PDF and DOC for drawing into PDF documents.

With the explosion of import functionality we have implemented a new ReadOptions class for full control over the process. This allows you to set normally hidden properties like timeouts, the module to be used for importing a particular file type or to control the way in which specific applications like OpenOffice.org handle complex features such as eForms. For example you might choose to import Microsoft Word documents using OpenOffice.org to specify a form submission method for embedded forms and a resampling resolution for embedded images.

ABCpdf now supports incremental update. Incremental update preserves document structure by appending changes onto an existing document. This means you can step back through the changes made each time it was saved. Plus it allows you to append a sequence of signatures to a document.

ABCpdf now has better eForm and Annotation support with enhanced rendering and generation of appearances for a wide variety of annotations such as highlights. Plus new features like support for comb fields, fields that separate each character with a line, and improvements to the eForm stamp methods.

It's been a long standing aim of ours to support clients using older versions of .NET. However this means that we've sometimes been unable to take advantage of newer .NET features. Now ABCpdf links dynamically into .NET 3.0 and later enabling features like WPF import and XPS export. However if you only have .NET 2.0 ABCpdf will still work fine with these features disabled.

ABCpdf now supports the new PDF 1.8 - Acrobat 9.0 - specification. Plus it reads and fixes corrupt and non-standard formats of PDF generated by new updates of popular software.

What's New in Other Versions