New PDF Features for Acrobat 9

PDFlib supports various PDF features according to Acrobat 9 (technically: PDF 1.7 Adobe extension level 3). More details about the following features can be found here:

External graphical content (Reference XObjects)

Layer variants (also called layer configurations)

PDF Portfolios

Georeferenced PDF

AES-256 encryption and Unicode passwords

PDFlib+PDI and PPS can import and process Acrobat 9 documents.

 

Font Handling and Text Output

Quite a number of new typographical features can be found in PDFlib 8. Please see here for details of these features:

Complex script shaping and bidirectional formatting for Arabic, Thai, Hindi, and many other writing systems

Fallback fonts

OpenType layout features, e.g. ligatures and swash characters

Retain fonts across documents

SING fonts for CJK Gaiji characters

Redesigned font engine

Wrap text around image clipping paths

Text on a path

 

PDFlib Block Plugin and PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS)

The PDFlib Block Plugin is used to prepare PDF documents for Block filling (personalization) with the PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS). Here is an overview of the new features:

Preview PPS Block processing in Acrobat

Redesigned user interface

Snap-to-grid for quickly layout out Blocks in a raster

Additional Block properties, e.g. for transparency

Clone PDF/A or PDF/X status of the Block container

Leverage PDFlib 8 features with Blocks

 

Other important features

There are a number of other important new features, details can be found here. These features include:

Reusable path objects

PDF/X-4 and PDF/X-5

Alpha channel in TIFF and PNG images

JBIG2-compressed images

Compressed object streams and cross-reference streams

Built-in PANTONE^® Goe™ color libraries

PDFlib 8 also introduces a variety of improvements in existing functions. Some of the most important items can be found here.