16.0.18

📅 2023-07-13

New features

Document API

This release introduces the Document API. This feature brings the concept of document into the iDRS, and offers a much more efficient and convenient way of managing a set of pages.

The Document API can work with user-defined page collections, but it comes with a default implementation that replaces the old page sets and page queues all-in-one.

• The page collection is designed to have a simple interface as easy to use as a basic array of pages.
• It includes an automatic memory footprint control by storing pages on disk when necessary.
• A multithreaded blocking mode allows pages to be added to the document while the output creation is already in progress. This mode takes advantage of the multithreaded architecture to improve overall workflow performance.

In addition to acting as a page container, the Document API also includes the document-level metadata. In earlier versions of the iDRS, this metadata was either defined at page level or provided via output parameters.

Regarding this feature, the API has been updated as follows:

• The class CDocument represents the document.

• The parameter argPageCollection can optionally be supplied when the document is created. This makes it possible to provide either a custom collection implementing the interface IPageCollection, or an instance of CDefaultPageCollection with specific options.
  If the parameter argPageCollection is not set, a CDefaultPageCollection is created, and the optional flag argBlocking can be set to enable its blocking mode. Blocking mode allows the document to be saved before pages are added, but setting the ReadyToClose property is necessary to mark the document as complete. This action will trigger the Document Writer (see below) to finish writing the output document.

• The read-only Pages property lets you access the page collection to add or retrieve CPage objects.

• The CDefaultPageCollection class implements the IPageCollection interface with all the features mentioned above.

• Similar to the class CPageMetadata available at page level, the new class CDocumentMetadata is now introduced to gather metadata information at document-level . It can be accessed via the property CDocument.Metadata and provides *the following properties:

  • CDocumentMetadata.MetadataInfo is used to define metadata information about the document, such as Author, Title, etc.
  • CDocumentMetadata.Bookmarks lets you add bookmarks to PDF documents.
  • CDocumentMetadata.Attachments lets you add attachments to PDF documents.

Improvements

Document Writer

To improve API consistency, the former class CDocumentOutput has been renamed CDocumentWriter.

• The OutputParams property of the CDocumentWriter class now consolidates output parameters. They are no longer defined as a parameter of the Save() method.
• The Save() method now takes either a CDocument, a CPageArray or a static array CPage[] as parameter.
• The CPageArray type definition has been added to the CPage API, providing an easy way to generate a document a the cost of limited features.

Caution

Providing a CPageArray or a CPage[] to the CDocument.Save() method: When using the Save() method with a CPageArray or a CPage[] as parameter, be aware that the metadata exposed at document level will not be available to create the output document.

Output parameters

The way in which metadata information is provided has been changed in this version. Instead of being part of the output parameters, it is now defined as a the document-level property.

The API has been modified as follows:

• The MetadataInfo property has been removed from the following classes:
  CPdfOutputParams, CXlsxOutputParams, CPptxOutputParams, CDocxOutputParams, COdtOutputParams, CRtfOutputParams, CEpubOutputParams and CHtmlOutputParams.
• The DigitalSignatures property has been moved from the class CPdfOutputParameters to the CDocumentMetadata class.

Bookmarks

The bookmarks are now defined as a property of the CDocumentMetadata class and have therefore been removed from the CPageMetadata class.
The CPageBookmark class now has an additional DestinationPage property that indicates which page the bookmark refers to.

Deprecated or removed resources

Removed page sets and page queues

The new CDefaultPageCollection class implements all the features that were dispersed across several collections in previous versions. Therefore, the following classes are removed:

• IPageQueue interface and its implementation CRangedPageQueue
• CPageSet interface and its implementations CMemoryPageSet, CPersistentPageSet.

Fixed bugs

ID	Description
IDRSRD-6368	The iDRS documentation should not state yet that Hindi language is supported
IDRSRD-6366	The iDRS CPageProcessing class do not use language detection result when relevant
IDRSRD-6365	The default workdepth of QRCode auxilliary engine is incorrect in version 16.0.17
IDRSRD-6363	The iDRS cannot load anymore Asian OCR resources from custom relative paths
IDRSRD-6358	Setting a custom array of CBarcodeEngineConfig in .NET API can lead to a crash
IDRSRD-6356	The iDRS should expose the possibility to keep original images dimensions when performing deskew operation
IDRSRD-6322	The iDRS doesn’t allow to set CPage.WorkImage property to null in the .NET API
IDRSRD-6290	The iDRS outputs characters with incorrect stretch factors when segmentation filter is disabled
IDRSRD-6269	The iDRS do not recognize datamatrix codes on specific documents
IDRSRD-6264	The iDRS loads landscape PDF content with incorrect orientation
IDRSRD-5660	The iDRS doesn’t find the correct orientation on some images with clear text snippets

Known Issues

In this release, the multithreaded pre-compression of PDF background images for the document output has been disabled. As a result, creating PDF documents with the Image over text display may lead to reduced performance compared to the previous release.
In a future release we will reintroduce this feature, and also extend it to cover more use cases.