The demand for the document creation services that LiveDocx offers has sky rocketed since its release in January 2009. Consequently, considerable work has gone into making LiveDocx 1.2 even faster and more efficient than previous versions. A massive thank you goes out to the LiveDocx backend engineers!

The five main changes in LiveDocx 1.2 and phpLiveDocx 1.2-20090810 are:

Save documents to XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Right from the start, phpLiveDocx has been able to save documents to DOCX, DOC, RTF, PDF, TXD and TXT. As of LiveDocx 1.2, it is now possible to save documents to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. As HTML is by far the most popular file format on the Internet, this addition opens the door to a number of new applications. As soon as documents can be natively displayed in a web browser and e-mail client, they easily be published on the Internet and shared ubiquitously.

Export documents to bitmap files

In addition to the document file formats, mentioned above, it is now possible to export documents to the following graphical file formats: BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG and TIFF. This addition to phpLiveDocx, is a great way to offer application end-users a preview of their documents in the browser. Similarly, for cases in which documents must be displayed directly in a browser, without the use of any plugins, a bitmap may now be generated.

Generate smaller documents

The more images that a document contains, the larger its filesize becomes. In order that LiveDocx runs as efficiently as possible, it is necessary to reduce the filesize of documents to a minimum. The internal handling of image data – in particular compression settings – has been optimized in LiveDocx 1.2. The benefits for the end-user are clear: smaller documents → faster downloads → overall improved end-user experience.

Append multiple documents together

As of phpLiveDocx 1.2, it is possible to assign multiple lines of merge data to a template. This results in multiple documents being created. These documents are appended to one another to become one (possibly very long) document, which can be saved to any supported format. This new feature is especially useful for scenarios, such as label printing and voucher or certificate creation.

Retrieve list of available server-side fonts

Templates may only contain fonts, which are installed on the LiveDocx server, otherwise they will be substituted when creating the document. This may lead to undesirable results, in particular, if exotic fonts are used. By default, the LiveDocx server makes available only Windows standard fonts. As of version 1.2, phpLiveDocx offers a method to retrieve an array of fonts installed on the LiveDocx server.

Update now

The latest version of phpLiveDocx is a drop in replacement for the previous version and is 100% backward compatible.

Download phpLiveDocx.

A large number of smaller improvements have been made throughout the Zend Framework, and around 700 issues resolved or closed since the release of 1.8.0.

phpLiveDocx 1.1 and phpLiveDocx 1.2 (not yet released) have been tested with this version and are 100% compatible. There are no backward compatibility issues in Zend Framework 1.9.

Update your projects now:

• Download Zend Framework 1.9
• Read Zend Framework 1.9 release blog

A massive thank you goes out to the Zend Framework contributors for producing such a high quality, powerful and easy to use framework with extensive corporate backing.

The four changes in LiveDocx 1.1 and phpLiveDocx 1.1-20090527 are:

SSL encryption is mandatory

When SSL encryption was enabled on the LiveDocx server last month, many users wrote us expressing their appreciation. In the following days, we received more e-mail generally saying that SSL should not be an option, but mandatory. Hence, with the goal of assisting PHP users to develop secure applications, all traffic between phpLiveDocx and LiveDocx is now encrypted using SSL. SSL can no longer be deactivated.

PDF files are much smaller

Many users expressed concern about the size of PDF files, produced by phpLiveDocx. The root of this problem could be traced back to a specific PDF export filter used by the underlying technology, which powers LiveDocx. In the meantime, this issue has been fixed and the produced PDF files are now much smaller.

New merge fields are available

The backend service LiveDocx runs on a technology called TX Text Control. Recently, TX Text Control 15.0 was released, which now supports a number of new merge field types. These merge fields (listed below) are now available in LiveDocx:

• MERGEFIELD
• DATE
• IF
• INCLUDETEXT

Additionally, a new merge field is populated automatically at the end of the merge process. It contains the total number of pages in the resulting document.

• NUMPAGES

I will post some examples, which use these new merge fields in the coming days.

Unit tests with PHPUnit

To ensure the high quality of phpLiveDocx remains thought the current and all future versions, full unit testing has been added. Take a look at the directory phplivedocx/tests in the downloadable distribution file. To start the tests, ensure you have PHPUnit installed (via PEAR) and run phplivedocx/run-tests.sh. The unit tests are written against PHPUnit 3.3.16.

Update now

The latest version of phpLiveDocx is a drop in replacement for the old version. Only in the case that you explicitly turned off SSL encryption in the constructor, do you need to delete the third parameter of the constructor. Remember: SSL encryption is now mandatory!

Download phpLiveDocx.