Aspose.Newsletter May 2010 edition is out now

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Aspose Newsletter for May 2010 has now been published that highlights all the newly supported features offered in the recent releases of its JasperReports exporters, SQL Server rendering extensions, .NET, Java and SharePoint components. This month’s technical article demonstrates how to clone every element of a slide from one presentation to another using Aspose.Slides for .NET and the importance and greater benefits of Priority Support service. Also several examples for migrating your report export solutions from MS SQL Server Reporting Services to Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Services and a demo shows how to auto-fit rows and columns in a worksheet using the Aspose.Cells for .NET API.

100,000th User - Could it be you? – Win $3000 worth of Aspose Software
We are fast approaching our 100,000th registered user at Aspose.com, to celebrate this amazing milestone and to thank our vibrant user community we are offering a fantastic prize. The 100,000th registered Aspose user will receive a free Developer Enterprise Subscription license to our flagship product suite, the Aspose.Total Product Family, worth over $3000. If you’ve been holding off downloading a trial of our software or joining the community, now is the time to join, it could be your lucky day!, click to sign up today or forward this newsletter to a friend you think may be interested.

Product Spotlight

Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Services is a robust .NET solution which allows you to produce PDF reports in Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 Reporting Services. Almost all RDL report features are supported. Some advanced features like adding PDF bookmarks, using HTML tags, XMP metadata, custom embedded font and rendering watermark for pages are now supported. Also convert all RDL report features including sections, images, charts, tables, matrices, headers and footers to PDF. It also enables you creating Pdf documents on the server without using Adobe PDF Library SDK. Try Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Services free today – See how Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Services can make Reporting Services work better for you.

Updates about new product releases

- Aspose.BarCode for Java v2.0.0: - Supports PZN and Deutsche Post Identcode symbologies
- Aspose.Slides for JasperReports v1.3.0: - Supports PPTX/PPSX export and offers JasperServer & JasperReports 3.7 compatibility
- Aspose.Network for .NET v5.1.0: - Fixes POP3, IMAP and MSG file loading issues
- Aspose.Tasks for .NET v2.7.0: - Supports more features regarding MS Project 2010 MPP read capability
- Aspose.Report for .NET v2.5.0: - Set Chart’s attributes through XML
- Aspose.Pdf for .NET v4.2.0: - BindFO, Stable InLineHTML and better memory management
- Aspose.Pdf.Kit for .NET v4.3.0: - PDF to image conversion, image and text extraction, form, concatenate, append and insert features have been improved
- Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java v2.8.0: - Image extraction, image conversion, PDF searcher and form features are improved
- Aspose.Slides for Java v2.2.0: - Support for PPT/PPTX to PDF and Slide/Shape names
- Aspose.Flash for .NET v2.7.0: - Support for converting SWF to EXE and EXE to SWF, creating slide show and applying transition effects
- Aspose.Words for SharePoint v1.3.0: - Supports SharePoint workflows
- Aspose.Words for .NET v9.0.0: - TOC update and MERGEFORMAT supported
- Aspose.Cells for .NET v4.9.0: - Calculate formulas beyond the Excel 2003 restriction and apply 3D chart effects
- Aspose.Form for .NET v2.8.1: - Choose from multiple date formats or limit the text length in your InfoPath forms
- Aspose.Report for Java v1.6.0: - Create Pareto, Step and Scatter charts your Java applications
- Aspose.BarCode for JasperReports v1.2.0: - PZN barcode supported
- Aspose.Cells for Java v2.2.0: - Set formulas beyond the Excel 2003 restriction and render charts in Excel to PDF

Priority Support

An increasing number of customers have expressed the need for “instant” support from us, these customers have needs that are usually attached to a deadline and require dedicated attention to help solve their problems when and if they occur. To help these customers better we have introduced Priority Support. This model of support builds on our excellent free support service but for a flat fee of $399 per year will give Priority users access to greater benefits including:
• 12 Hour Guaranteed Response Time – 7 days a week
• Access to our private Priority Support forum
• Issue escalation to product development teams
• Hotfixes delivered to address your issues
• Ability to prioritize feature requests
Read more about Priority Support .

Aspose takes 5 awards this year in the 2009-2010 ComponentSource Awards

Aspose is incredibly proud to announce that we have received 5 awards from ComponentSource, the world’s largest provider of software tools and components. The awards include the Top 10 Bestselling Publisher Award and the Top 25 Bestselling Product Award. These awards are based on true product sales so the judging panel is the users that buy our products. You can view our current awards on our Industry Awards page. .

Technical Article – Slides cloning – an insight

Cloning slides is a frequently performed activity when creating new MS PowerPoint slides from existing MS PowerPoint slides programmatically. This article covers the steps required to clone every element of a slide from one presentation to another using Aspose.Slides for .NET. You can find the complete article here .

Tutorial Video – Using auto-fit options

In this video tutorial, we show you how to auto-fit rows and columns in a worksheet using the Aspose.Cells for .NET API. In this video, we create a simple Windows application to demonstrate the Auto-Fit operations. View the complete video about auto-fit options here.

Migration from MS SSRS to Aspose – Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Service

In this month’s newsletter we include several ex amples for migrating your report export solutions from MS SQL Server Reporting Services to Aspose.Pdf for Reporting Services. You can find the detailed article here.

Collect your copy of Aspose Newsletter, April 2010 edition

– Collect the English version of this newsletter.

– Collect the English version of this newsletter.

Contact Information
Suite 119, 272 Victoria Avenue
Chatswood, NSW, 2067
Australia
Aspose - The .NET and Java component publisher
sales@aspose.com
Phone: 888.277.6734
Fax: 866.810.94651

 

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The Rendering Fidelity of Footnotes

Introduction:

The aim of this article is to reveals some important facts about how Aspose.Words handles and support rendering of footnotes and endnotes when rendering documents to PDF, XPS or printing. The article will also explain how Microsoft Word handles some tricky layouts and even discloses some obscure flaws. It also explains the reasons why it taking so long for the Aspose.Words team to support footnotes. We hope this article would reveal some interesting points to Aspose.Words customers & developers.

The most obvious objective of Aspose.Words layout engine is to produce similar result to Microsoft Word. Our team has spent a lot of time in figuring out how Microsoft Word formats a document into pages. No doubt Footnotes are very important for us because many of our customers have requested for this feature. We hope this article would reveal some interesting points to Aspose.Words customers who are waiting for footnotes to be supported or to any other developer whoever pondered about document layout.

What Aspose’s Team has Done so Far

The new release of Aspose.Words for .NET supports rendering of footnotes to some extent but there is still room for a lot to be done. With this release it would be possible to render some simple documents but not very complex one. Looking to the high demand from our customers our team has decided, that it is better to include it now rather than later.
Some of the limitations are:
- Only footnotes are rendered. Endnotes are not rendered.
- Footnotes are rendered immediately below text (not at the bottom of the page)
- Wrapping of long footnotes to next page is not supported. The text of the footnote could be truncated.
- Occasionally the text of the footnote will not appear.
More complete support is coming in the next version, estimated in May 2010.

Magic Footnotes

Everybody that is using Microsoft Word must have some idea about footnotes and endnotes, below are some important points that would give our readers more clear understanding of footnotes and endnotes functionality.
- Footnote or endnote consists of two parts. One part is a reference mark in the main text story of the document. The other part is the content of the footnote or endnote which is typically rendered at the bottom of the page or at the end of the document.
- References are continuously numbered, but can use custom marks or skip numbers.
- There are also three types of delimiters used to separate main text from the footnote/endnote text. They are separator, continuation separator and continuation notice.
- Footnote/endnote text can wrap from one column to another and can occupy one or more pages at the end of a section.
- There are two types of locations for footnote text and two types for endnote text.
- Footnote/endnote numbering and location can be specified per section in a document.
When our team starting to analyze this feature I knew that implementation challenge wouldn’t be technical but rather logical. The layout model of the document (it was adapted from Aspose.Editor before it was discontinued) already provides more functionality than required by Aspose.Words rendering. It already keeps track of all stories in the document but until recently footnotes story was ignored.
With this kind of attitude our team was hoping to prototype Aspose.Words code in a few hours and started to create small, but tricky test documents in Microsoft Word and tried to push its layout engine into a corner and that’s where the “magic” begun.

Magic 1: Non-trivial ordering of footnotes

While table fits into one page footnotes flow according to the logical order of the references in the main text story, from 1 to 9. The second screenshot has same numbers for references but content is now ordered differently. There is no error and “yes” there are two “5” footnotes. This is how Word 2007 renders this case (not surprising though). Let’s ignore the bug for now but focus on the ordering issue.
Technically, a footnote story can be represented as a linked list of runs that is “1 One¶2 Two¶…9 Nine¶”. In Microsoft Word you can move caret from one footnote to another and using VBA you can query current position in the story which returns increasing integer. Word’s layout engine uses this order to pick a next portion of content to be flowed into a geometrical container. However, as we’ve seen this no longer works for footnotes since “seven” is rendered after “nine”.

Magic 2: Column Balancing with Footnotes
The second thing is balancing of text columns. If a section ends with a “section break continuous” break and it has two or more columns then the content will be balanced between last group of columns of this section to minimize height of this group. Microsoft Word will include the height of the footnotes/endnotes into the column and balancing shall account for it.
Right, a bug again. Endnote “C” is overlapped by content of a second section on the page. Ignore the bug for now, but still the issue is that the column was designed to aggregate main text story content, however, as we’ve seen content of footnote/endnote stories is also flowed into it and balancing must handle this properly.

Magic 3: Wrapping to Next Page
Third and last for this post is picking the right positions to wrap footnote and main text content. Our initial thoughts were that Microsoft Word flows main text story content and footnotes in parallel. We thought that it attempts to flow footnote content as soon as a reference is flowed into the column. However the next example made us anxious.
If the idea was correct, then Microsoft Word would flow both 1st and 2nd footnotes right after first two lines of the main text story are flowed into the column, which means that 2nd footnote would fit on the first page completely and last two lines of the paragraph would be wrapped to the next column. However this doesn’t happen. Do you know why?
You need to take paragraph rules into account. They are working in both main text and footnote text. There are also rules which try to keep the reference and content on the same page, rules about sharing of page by footnotes and endnotes, separator overflows, and hopefully you’ll get an idea of why it takes so long to implement layout of footnotes/endnotes the way Microsoft Word does it.

If you have something to say we’d be more than glad to hear it.

Overview: Aspose.Words for .NET

Aspose.Words is a word processing component that enables .NET applications to read, write and modify Word documents without using Microsoft Word. Other useful features include document creation, content and formatting manipulation, mail merge abilities, reporting features and support of DOCX, DOC, WordprocessingML, HTML, XHTML, TXT and PDF formats (requires Aspose.Pdf). It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. You can even use Aspose.Words for .NET to build applications with Mono.

More about Aspose.Words for .NET

- Homepage Aspose.Words for .NET:
- Features overview Aspose.Words for .NET:
- Online documentation of Aspose.Words for .NET:
- Post your technical questions/queries to Aspose.Words for .NET :
- Receive notifications about latest news and supported features by subscribing to Aspose.Words for .NET :

Contact Information
Suite 119, 272 Victoria Avenue
Chatswood, NSW, 2067
Australia
Aspose - The .NET and Java component publisher
sales@aspose.com
Phone: 888.277.6734
Fax: 866.810.94651

 

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Improved PDF Rendering & Date Selection From Multiple Date Formats

What is new in this release?

This most recent version of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java 2.8.0 includes plenty of new and improved features. Now you can convert JBIG2 encoded images into your required image formats using the latest version of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java. Apart from that there have been some improvements in terms of PDF to image conversion, text searching, image extraction and form filling features. The main new & improved features added in this version are listed below.
- Add support of page rotation
- Image Extraction - JBIG2 Decoder support
- Incorrect API Spelling: SavaAsTIFF should be SaveAsTIFF

Other most recent bug fixes are also included in this release.

Newly added documentation pages and articles

Some new tips and articles have now been added into Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java documentation that may guide you briefly how to use Aspose.Pdf.Kit for performing different tasks like the followings.

- Managing MultiView Forms :
- Managing Resources in Aspose.Form for .NET Project:


Overview: Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java

Aspose.Pdf.Kit is a Java component for PDF document manipulation of both windows & web based Java applications that allow developers to edit existing PDF documents. Main features include; Filling XFA fields in PDF, creating PDF document link, font style, modifying AcroForm, extracting and adding Images and text, getting and modifying meta information of PDF file, encrypting or decrypting a PDF file, Adding watermark or logo, append pages and converting PDF file to a single Tiff file or XML file.

More about Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java
- Homepage of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java:
- Product Overview and Features for Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java:
- Online documentation of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java:
- Demos of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java:
- Post your technical questions/queries to Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java Forum:
- Receive notifications about latest news and supported features by subscribing to Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java blog :

Contact Information
Suite 119, 272 Victoria Avenue
Chatswood, NSW, 2067
Australia
Aspose - The .NET and Java component publisher
sales@aspose.com
Phone: 888.277.6734
Fax: 866.810.94651