What's New in Oxygen PDF Chemistry 23.1

March 4, 2021

Version 23.1 of Oxygen PDF Chemistry adds more improvements and customization possibilities for the CSS Paged Media processor used for obtaining PDF output from HTML or XML documents by styling them with CSS.

Some examples of the enhancements include more details about warning and error messages to assist with debugging, additional support was added for some requested CSS properties and some new parameters were added to help fine-tune customizations, and the memory footprint was optimized to provide better performance.

You can visually customize the PDF output using the Oxygen Styles Basket, a free web-based visual tool that helps you fine-tune the CSS that is used by Oxygen PDF Chemistry to produce PDF or by Oxygen XML WebHelp to produce web help output.

Chemistry Processor

Oxygen Styles Basket

The new Oxygen Styles Basket is a handy web-based visual tool that helps you to fine-tune the CSS file that is used to customize your PDF or WebHelp output. You simply pick and mix aspects from galleries to add and adjust the rules in your custom CSS file. Watch this video to see a visual overview of the tool.

Fine-Tune the Position of Block Elements

The position CSS property now supports the relative value, making it easier to fine-tune the position of block elements.

Enable/Disable Glyph Substitution for Latin Scripts

A new parameter (-enable-latin-glyph-substitutions) can be used to enable or disable glyph substitution for Latin-based scripts. This is helpful if you encounter problems rendering accented glyphs, as you can set the parameter to no to disable the font glyph substitutions. For more information, see the description and notes for this parameter in Chemistry Command Line Parameters.

Fallback Font Added for Italic CJK Characters

A default fallback front was added for italicized CJK text so that if a specified font is not compatible with certain characters, the new fallback font is used instead.

Better Information for Warnings and Errors

Warning and error messages were improved to include more information about the problems. For example, the text and ID from the element that is causing the problem is now presented along with the location of the FO file.

Full Support for 'font-variant-numeric' CSS Property

The font-variant-numeric CSS property is now fully supported. It controls the usage of alternate glyphs for numbers, fractions, and ordinal markers.

Improved Memory Footprint

Several issues that caused memory leaks were resolved.