What's new in Leaflet 9.0

Leaflet 9.0 announced as major release for 2010.

 

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What's new in Leaflet 9.0
Article Index
What's new in Leaflet 9.0
New hyphenation dictionaries
Inline shapes in HTML text
Protected PDF files
Performance gain
Support for Indesign Master Pages
Support for margins
Plug-in for updates
All Pages

Here is the list of new features of Leaflet 9.0:                                                                                             

  1. New hyphenation dictionaries
  2. Inline shapes in HTML text
  3. Protected PDF files
  4. Performance gain
  5. Indesign output enhancements
    1. Support for Indesign Master Pages
    2. Support for margins
    3. Plug-in for updates

openoffice logo

We are integrating the OpenOffice hyphenation dictionaries into Leaflet.

There is a very broad set of languages available and they evolve as fast as the community supporting them, so up to date hyphenation rules are available for German or French for example.

The latest versions of the hyphenation dictionaries can be downloaded from the Internet.


Inline objects have been available in HTML text for a long time, but they were limited to pictures. A few tags were available for object control (about resolution and size).

Example of an inline picture: <html><IMG src="/1.eps" USEMAXQUALITY height=2500µm> Hello World

The new "YOffset" tag attribute defines the offset related to the baseline.

With LL9 all existing shapes can also be used inline. Additional tags and attributes have been defined for this purpose:

Example of an inline shape:
<html><FRM width=5cm height=10mm bkgndcolor="red" bordercolor="blue" borderwidth=1000µm yoffset=-1mm shape=RoundRect shapedx=1900µm shapedy=500µm> Hello world.

With these additional features calculated fields can render sophisticated text as a combination of (composed) html text with inline pictures and inline shapes while mixing at the same time standard and specific fonts containing pictos. It should be noted that the data used for the sample table below is not formatted anyway in the database to become this result. All formatting occurs in the template and the calculated field that contains the logic of the assembled html text.

Table as in PDF

 

Table in Indesign
 Product data as shown in PDF Same table as exported in Indesign

Specific care has been taken to have an intelligent export to Indesign.

The text above is automatically rendered as text cells in a table.

In Indesign all text and graphical objects are still editable with outstanding productivity.


It is now possible to cipher PDF files with a password. encryptedPDF.jpg

With this additional capability you will be able to protect the PDFs that you are making from unauthorised usage (like viewing, editing, extracting pictures, printing etc…). It is password protected and ciphered, so the efforts needed to circumvent the protection lay beyond the skills of most users.

This protection follows standard Adobe guidelines and uses Adobe technology and is therefore totally compatible with other PDF related applications.


The Leaflet engine has got a rework to achieve another global performance gain.

When the user generates a document, it is most of the time to display it directly afterwards. Through additional buffers, Leaflet 9.0 is able to create most of the computations needed for display at generation time. This produces a slightly faster generation time, but mainly a much faster first display time. Documents that made use of those new buffers showed a performance gain up to 15%.


Indesign master spread
We have improved the Indesign output with comprehensive support for Master Pages. If you want to have Master Pages in Indesign, just define Styles in Leaflet. 

A Style in Leaflet becomes a Master Page in Indesign.
A hierarchy of Styles becomes a hierarchy of Master Pages.

Dynamic attributes (text, colour etc…) make use of the “Master Page override” feature of Indesign: The variable text of a chapter heading is automatically taken out of the Master Page and copied into the page that is using the Master Page.

For projects using facing pages, it is now possible to define Styles accordingly. A “facing pages” style will be spread over 2 pages: a left and a right page. Those Styles will also export to “Master spreads” in Indesign.

 

 


It is possible to define margins in the Indesign output profile. Those margins will be active at document level and will dynamically be applied to all Master Pages and Pages of the Indesign document.

While it was possible to do an update of an Indesign file with the "XML from Indesign" export, we found that this approach had some drawbacks, so a new update workflow is in the works.

It has the following characteristics:

  • More fields will be updateable: picture links, cells in tables, distinct values and even (some) calculated fields will be updateable.
  • Easy view of changes: compare if needed actual database value with the document value.
  • Detailed control of the updates: one will be able to update 1 field, 1 page or 1 document the same way.

In a second stage, the update will work in both directions:

  • Update the document with new content from the database or
  • Update the database with new content from the document (with the necessary credentials)