XMetaL Author Essential 17.0 Release Notes

Contents

Introduction

XMetaL Author is the leading authoring application for organizations using any XML document type. XMetaL Author also helps you maximize content reuse through tight integration with content repositories, and address advanced publishing requirements with an extensible publishing framework.

With this version, XMetaL Author introduces an upgraded XMetaL Development Environment, improved editor performance and High-DPI monitors support, new XMetaL APIs for running scripts asynchronously and managing document highlighted text, integration with Microsoft Edge, and bookmarks and comments support. For a complete list of new features, see New features.

New features

XMetaL Editor and Development Environment

XMetaL Author Essential 17.0:
  • Development, build environments and SDKs are upgraded to the most recent versions.

  • It passed formal QA tests on the Windows 11 platform.

  • Significant performance improvements for file opening and documents editing operations

    For large test documents (over 4 Gb size, containing over 50.000 elements and over 1000 inline images) opening documents time decreased several times.

  • High-DPI monitors support

    XMetaL now takes the DPI of displays into account and is able to natively render their contents on High-DPI monitors.

  • New APIs for:
    • running specific XMetaL scripts in synchronous and asynchronous modes
    • managing document's text highlighting
  • Support of integration with Microsoft Edge

    XMetaL 17.0 installation contains XMEdge ActiveX control that can be hosted by the XMetaL Resources Manager. XMEdge ActiveX control allows bidirectional interactions between XMetaL and Microsoft Edge via a subset of ICoreWebView2, ICoreWebView2Controller, ICoreWebView2Environment interfaces, and XMetaL APIs and scripts.

    • Access from the Microsoft Edge script engine to XMetaL scripts via:
      • asynchronous post messages to XMetaL
      • asynchronous run XMetaL macros and scripts
      • synchronous/asynchronous XMetaL API calls
      • synchronous/asynchronous XMetaL script global functions calls
    • Access from the XMetaL script engine to Microsoft Edge scripts via:
      • asynchronous post messages to Microsoft Edge
      • asynchronous execution Microsoft Edge scripts
      • helper methods that allow simulation of synchronous browser navigation and script calls
    • Access from Microsoft Edge script engine to ActiveX controls via:
      • creating ActiveX controls by Prog IDs

        ActiveX control methods can be called synchronously or asynchronously from Microsoft Edge scripts.

    • Passing XMEdge notifications and data to the XMetaL script environment

      Notifications and data exchange between XMetaL and Microsoft Edge uses JSON format.

      Notifications and data are related to:

      • Microsoft Edge Navigation events
      • Processing messages
      • Executing scripts
      • Microsoft Edge accelerators keys events
  • Various customer's feature requests and defect fixes are addressed.

Find text on WEB

An XMetaL tool with the following features:

  • Demonstrates XMetaL script customization based on integration with Microsoft Edge

  • Allows finding Active document selected text on the WEB or passing selected text as a URI parameter to online WEB services

  • Allows maintaining home page, search engines and favorite sites

  • Allows defining xml template and pasting it to an XMetaL active document

    Parameters of xml template are web page title, web page URI, clipboard content, and active document selection.

  • Allows running XMetaL macro scripts

    Macro script has full access to XMEdge ActiveX control interfaces, web page scripts, and XMetaL script environment.

  • Contains examples of Google, Bing and WIKI search engines, Google online translate service, paste templates, and test macro

Bookmarks and comments

An XMetaL tool with the following features:

  • Allows marking active document text as a bookmark without changing document content

  • Allows adding/modifying bookmark comments without changing document content

  • Contains four predefined groups of bookmarks

  • Bookmark can be assigned (or reassigned) to any group.

  • Every group of bookmarks has a designated highlighting color.

  • Every group of bookmarks can be shown or hidden.

  • Bookmarks can be sorted or ordered manually.

  • Allows finding bookmarks by bookmark or comments text, opening document and scrolling to selected bookmark

  • Context popup menu and bookmarks macros with connection to "Find and Execute XMetaL Command" allow fast access and efficient bookmarks and comments management.

  • Allows fast navigation between bookmarks

  • Allows showing only bookmarks of specific document

  • Contains three types of user interfaces for flexible and efficient work with documents

Known issues

Tools > Options dialog accelerators don't work sometimes

Some property pages within the new unified options dialog won't respond to keyboard shortcuts until focus is moved into the embedded XFT form that is on the active property page. This limitation relates to Windows' handling of embedded ActiveX controls.

The x64 Cameras In Focus and Meeting Minutes samples have some features that don't work

A few of the Cameras In Focus and Meeting Minutes sample's features rely upon Microsoft components that do not have an x64 equivalent (e.g. MSScript.ocx, MSCAL1.ocx). Yet other features rely upon a x64 version of Microsoft Word to be installed on the computer. In the x64 version of the software, these samples have been removed from the Help > Samples submenu to avoid issues. You can still invoke either samples template but please use caution when running these samples as they may not gracefully degrade when invoking features with a dependency on these 3rd party items.

Built-in toolbar auto-layout on first launch

When XMetaL Author is started for the first time, the built-in toolbars will each be docked on a separate row. Custom DTD-specific toolbars will be docked more efficiently (i.e. multiple per row) providing there is enough horizontal space to do so. Once toolbars have been reorganized (by dragging them around), their positions will be remembered. This vertically oriented auto-layout for built-in toolbars will also take effect any time the XMetaL Author workspace is reset, which is done by holding the Ctrl key down at startup.

Child submenus/menu items not copied when moving top-level menu buttons

Moving top-level menu buttons will not copy the child submenus or menu items. Similarly, moving submenu items will not duplicate those child items.