July 28 2011. This release adds a new loop tool, customizable context menu and access to panels (signatures, thumbnails, comments), shortcuts to open and create links and improvements with form fields editing.

Version numbers: jPDFNotes v4.60, jPDFViewer v6.10.

New Features:

Loupe tool – 1767 – A new loop tool allows to see small details on a PDF document more closely. The tool displays a rectangle that can be moved on a page and the magnified version of the corresponding area is displayed in a floating window. This tool will be useful in a number of industries such as printing, graphics, electronics and biology.

Customizable Context menus and access to panels – 1560.

  • There’s a new package called pdfNotes.contextmenus in the API which allows to customize context menus within the java bean giving control to developers over the various context menus.
  • There’s also a new package called pdfNotes.panels which allows to access the following panels: Signatures, Page View and Comments panes. Panels are accessible though the new PDFNotesBean methods getPageViewPanelNotes, getSignaturePanelNotes() , getCommentPanelNotes().

“Open Link” and “Create Link” – 731 – When the text selected on a page corresponds to a valid web or email url, the mouse context menu will show an option to “Open Link”. This offers a convenient shortcut to browse to web links present in a document. The “Create Link” menu option will also now default the url to the text url making it faster to create link annotations “on the fly” from existing urls in the document content.

Improvements:

Interactive form field font autosize – 1068 – Autosize font is implemented for both single line and multiline text fields.

Goto page actions – 1289 – Support for all goto page actions in named destinations: x,y,z location, zoom mode, page view (Fit to Page, Fit to Width). This affects bookmarks, links and buttons.

API change to create temporary file – 1394 – New method in PDFNotesBean called setCreateTempOnSave(boolean createTempOnSave). Sets whether or not a temporary file is to be created during a save operation. By default, jPDFNotes uses a temporary file when saving a documents locally (overwriting an existing file) in order to avoid losing the document if any error happens.Through this new method, customers can change the default behavior.

Fixes:

Unrecognized command – 867,1313,1357,1426 – Error rendering Page: Unrecognized Command. Such errors happened when the PDF parsing engine had issues detecting the end of image stream on inline images. Not all “Unrecognized Command” issues are resolved but a lot of them.

Open document error – 1525, 1530 – Fixed regression issue introduced in previous version when opening a PDF document containing annotations with null dates values (this error happened for instance for documents created in Open Office).

(Linux) – OpenJDK JPEG image rendering – 1274 – For rendering JPEG images, jPDFNotes used to depend on internal sun classes. These classes are not supported correctly in OpenJDK and Linux customers running this version of Java could not see JPEG images. jPDFNotes now uses standard imageio classes to render JPEG images.

Black boxes – 1330 –  Fixed issue where some PDF documents were displaying “black boxes” (issue in IndexedColorSpace conversion from float color).Form fields flattening – 1581 – Fixed issue when flattening form fields data in very specific cases (field data contained the string ” Q ” which corresponds to a push in PDF command).

Multiline form fields – 1789 – Application was extremely slow when typing large amounts of data in a multiline text field.

Invalid bookmark page destination – 1285 – Fixed issue with bookmarks not going to the correct pages when in Fit To Page view mode.

Quirks with grouped annotations – 1262 – Improved the way typewriter and free text annotations behave when they are grouped and copied.

Appending pages from interactive form – 1656 – For some interactive forms, a null pointer exception happened when merging field names.

Merged document corrupted – 1703 – After merging 2 PDF interactive forms, Adobe Reader reported that the output document had errors and crashed.

API Change: SetSplitPolicy – 1559 – The method setSplitPolicy in PDFNotesBean has been “undeprecated” as it is still needed and there is no good replacement for it.

Many internal improvements and fixes.

Press release: Summer release of Java PDF components and libraries adds loupe tool in web components and gives developers more control.