ICEreader SDK 6.1.4
Release Notes

October 6th, 2008

These release notes contain the following topics:

• Changes in Version 6.1.4

• Changes in Version 6.1.3

• Changes in Version 6.1.2

• Changes in Version 6.1.1

• Changes in Version 6.1

• Known Issues

• Support

Changes in Version 6.1.4

The following section describes the most significant changes in this release. For a comprehensive listing of all changes, see http://support.icesoft.com/jive/category.jspa?categoryID=37.

ICEreader SDK 6.1.4 improvements include the following:

General

• The ContentLoader now reflectively tries to invoke the setChunkedStreamingMode(...) when uploading files to avoid potential OutOfMemory errors when uploading very large files. Chunked streaming mode is available when running on JDK 1.5+.

HTML

• When setting the align property on the parent <tr> element, the child <th> element now correctly inherits the alignment and also become left aligned.

• Support for the non-standard DOM event property pageX/Y has been added.
• An issue in table layout that could cause the last column in a large table to be rendered off the page has been corrected.
• Background color: rgb() now defaults to white instead of black.
• A couple of minor regressions table layout introduced in 6.1.3 have been corrected.

CSS

• An issue that resulted in the entire 'style' declaration being ignored in cases where one entry was improperly terminated has been resolved. Ex. "style='border-style: ;  border-width=2px; " would ignore the border-width setting.

• A bug that would sometimes cause back-ground images to not load properly has been corrected.

• The following Print-related issues have been resolved:

• Overlapping text on anchors when printing
• java.lang.StackOverFlowError when printing large table
• Print selection doesn't work for selected content inside iframe

Changes in Version 6.1.3

The following section describes the most significant changes in this release. For a comprehensive listing of all changes, see http://support.icesoft.com/jive/category.jspa?categoryID=37.

ICEreader SDK 6.1.3 improvements include the following:

General

• ICEreader is now certified and optimized for JDK 1.6 and Windows Vista

• New browser emulation modes have been added for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Firefox 2 (FF2). Also, the IE emulation modes now dynamically generate the user agent string based on the actual system information (operating system and version) - now accurately reports when running on Vista vs. XP.

• A new callback API has been added to optionally notify the application whenever the viewport scroll position changes

• The following general issues have been fixed:

• A bug Relative links do not work when using 118 jvm and loading files from the drive
• Deadlock flushing and loading images on Mac OS X, Linux
• ImageCache blocks images returned as result of query from updating
• Image loading regression when IB not visible
• Add support for creating a scriptable XML DOM
• Lexer should recognize <![CDATA[ and ]]> instead of eating it
• FileNotFound exception when using ice.debug.capture_all_input property
• Add method to get height and width of document laid out in viewport
• Defs sandboxed system properties strips non-String values
• IB doesn't handle new UnsupportedOperationException thrown by JDK 1.5
• HistoryManager throws NPE
• Enable ice.debug.capture_all_input causes FileNotFoundException

HTML

• Added default checkbox & radiobutton focus indicator settings for JDK 1.6

• Fixed the following HTML issues:

• Using EMBED tag to view Applets doesn't work
• Page doesn't always relayout when images load
• Nested table with white space in td (containing img as table cell) leads to gap. Note that a new System property has been added to optionally alter the ICEreader layout engine to remove the undesired whitespace (-Dice.pilots.html4.ignoreEmptyTextboxes=true).
  
• Wrong background-layout in Table
• Incorrect character wrap for Chinese, Japanese, Korean text

CSS

• Support for STYLE page-break is has been added

• The following CSS issues have been fixed:
• Z-index= -1 is not working even setting the ice.pilots.html4.doZIndexTest property
• Relative path in external css file should be relative to where the external css file is
• Background image in div tags with centered or right aligned text
• CSSs hover does not work with images
• style: hover declared on a link within a div (has overflow:auto attribute) will not display
• Layout not invalidated by dynamic change to .className

• The following Print-related issues have been resolved:

• Print with large scale factor causes NPE
• Form elements in IFrame do not appear in headless mode/Print Preview
• Single page with table at 100% causes extra blank page to be printed
• Colours go beyond box when printed
• Content doesn't scale properly for page with both verticle/horizontal frames
• Frame not being displayed or printed properly
• Adjusting scale in print preview dialog for page with frameset doesn't work
• HTML to PDF example throws OutofMemoryException
• StormPageFormat.setMargin fails if page size < 36 pixel

• The default storm file has been modified so that directly loading a .css or .js file will now render the file in the Text pilot instead of failing with a "Pilot Not Found" error.

• The following issues have been resolved:

• Image pilot does not listen for scrollbar property

• The RenderDoneTracker used in the HTMLtoPDF examples has been enhanced to handle empty frames and sub-viewport loading errors resulting in improved robustness.
  

• A new HTML2PDFwithHeader example has been added that illustrates using ICEreader to generate an HTML content header in addition to the original HTMLtoPDF functionality.

Changes in Version 6.1.2

The following section describes the most significant changes in this release. For a comprehensive listing of all changes, see http://support.icesoft.com/jive/category.jspa?categoryID=37.

ICEreader SDK 6.1.2 improvements include the following:

General

• ICEreader has been enhanced to optionally transform unstyled XML files into an HTML Document Tree view, similar to the behavior of MSIE and FireFox.  To enable the automatic conversion of XML documents to a Document Tree in the HTML4 Pilot, the following system property must be defined: "ice.pilots.html4.viewXmlAsTree=true". See "Rendering XML Documents" on pg. 77 of the ICEreader SDK Developer's Guide for details on this feature.

• The StormBase class has been modified to ensure that any viewport names that it generates are unique at the time of their creation. Previously, the viewport name was always set to "viewport", even if another viewport with the same name already existed. Note that the Stormbase class only generates names for viewports if none is provided by the application when the viewport is created.

HTML

• The appearence form widgets when rendering using the "swing" toolkit in headless mode has been improved. In addition, the form widgets are now colored based on the active Swing Look & Feel settings.

• A problem that prevented the use of the "ice.pilots.html4.baseFontFamily" from being used in cases where a font that can render all the glyphs in the text could be found on the system has been corrected.

• The "ice.pilots.html4.baseFontSize" system property is no longer supported. Previously this value was used to size the "ice.pilots.html4.baseFontFamily" font in cases where a font that could render all the glyphs in the text could not be found on the system. The font size is now determined via the CSS styles applied to the document which provides superior results in the majority of cases.

• An issue that could result in the incorrect sizing of a document when the document was rendered inside a container that was not visible on the screen has been corrected.
  

CSS

• A problem that in some circumstances could cause styled text to appear 1 pixel lower than surrounding text on the same line has been corrected.

• A problem that could result in the bottom edge of a border being 1 pixel shorter than the top edge of the border has been corrected.
  

• The "Smart Page Break" algorithm has been enhanced to improve the performance and accuracy of the page break calculations.
  

• A problem that prevented table-cell background images from being rendered when printing has been corrected.

• A problem that could cause an exception when printing text content using the Text Pilot has been corrected.

• The Image Pilot has been enhanced to optionally support several additional image types, including BMP and TIFF.  See "Image Pilot" on pg. 90 of the ICEreader SDK Developer's Guide for more information.

• A bug that could cause strange artifacts to be displayed while an image was being loaded in the Image Pilot has been corrected.

• The Swing RI, Generic RI, Enhanced AWT RI, and SWT Example application have all been updated to enable viewing unstyled XML documents as a Document Tree by default. See "Rendering XML Documents" on pg. 77 of the ICEreader SDK Developer's Guide for details on this feature.

• A dependency in the ice.ri.common.print.jdk13.PrintHelper13 class on the ice.ri.common.swing.PageSetupDialog class has been removed. It is now possible to use the PrintHelper13 class without having the ice.ri.common.swing.PageSetupDialog class on the classpath. This problem resulted in a ClassNotFoundException being thrown in the Generic RI when printing.

• The Swing RI and the Generic RI have been enhanced to display an informational dialog window when a user attempts a print or print-preview operation when viewing a content-type that doesn't support printing directly via the browser, such as when viewing PDF documents via the optional ICEpdf pilot.

• Corrected an error in the ICEreaderExamples/src/HTML2PDF/HTMLToPDFHeadlessExample.java file that prevented text antialiasing from being enabled correctly.

Changes in Version 6.1.1

The following section describes most of the changes in the v6.1.1 release. For a comprehensive listing of all changes, see http://support.icesoft.com/jive/category.jspa?categoryID=37.

ICEbrowser SDK 6.1.1 improvements include the following:

General

• ICEbrowser now fully supports ICEfaces^TM Direct-to-DOM^TM HTML rendering.
  

• A new ContentLoaderFactory has been introduced to support the specification of a custom default ContentLoader for each StormBase instance via the Settings object. This can be useful in cases where custom processing of the input-stream is required, such as decrypt encrypted content.

• A regression in v6.1.0 that prevented the correct rendering of HTML documents after a non-styled XML document was viewed has been corrected.

• An issue was corrected that could cause the browser to reset viewport state such as the scroll-position of the document, or the scroll position within a Select input widget when the DOM was updated dynamically via JavaScript.

• A bug in the algorithm used to determine the location of the highlighted regions as used by the "Highlight All" search feature was fixed.

• A bug that could prevent the last word in a document from being included in a search has been corrected.

• A problem on Mac OS X platforms caused by a JVM bug that resulted in significant performance degradation when drawing focus indicators has been resolved.

• A new system property "ice.util.net.convertURLBackslashes" can be used to optionally convert backslashes in "http:" URLs to forward-slashes in a manner consistent with MSIE.
  

HTML

• Several bugs relating to the File Input widget have been corrected.

• The Text Input widget behavior in Swing toolkit mode has been changed to automatically select any existing text in a Text when the user uses the keyboard (tab key) to focus on it. This is in alignment with most other browsers such as MSIE and Firefox.
  

• Images with content-type: "image/jpg" specified in an OBJECT tag are now supported. Previously, JPEG images had to specified as "image/jpeg".

• Fixed a problem that prevented the Ctrl+/- zoom in/out keys from working correctly when a text input form element has focus.

• Improved support for retaining minimum representation of table cell padding and borders when displaying at less than 100% zoom levels. This prevents cell padding or borders from disappearing completely when a document is scaled below 100%.

• Fixed a memory leak that could occur on DHTML pages containing choice input form elements that involved rapid, ongoing re-layouts of the page. This problem only affected Swing toolkit mode.
  

• All calculated point (pt) values are now rounded instead of truncated. This corrects some font size problems on some sites.

• Support for background images on Table headers, rows, and footers has been added.

• The "Smart Page Breaks" feature has been enhanced to avoid splitting a page across a line of text when the page consists of a single column table.

• A problem that caused hidden iframes to be printed has been corrected.

• A new SWT (Standard Widget Set) example application has been added that illustrates using ICEbrowser with applications developed using the SWT toolkit.  See the Developer's Guide for more information.

• A new HTML-to-PDF example has been added that illustrates generating PDF captures of a rendered HTML document.   See the Developer's Guide for more information.

• A new printing example has been added that illustrates using the JDK 1.4 Print Service API (javax.print) to print a rendered HTML document to a Postscript (.ps) file.  See the Developer's Guide for more information.

Changes in Version 6.1

The following sections describe most of the changes in the v6.1 release. For a comprehensive listing of all changes, see http://support.icesoft.com/jive/category.jspa?categoryID=37.

General

• Rendering HTML documents in headless environments is now fully supported using the Swing toolkit mode. This is useful for web crawling, HTML to image, and HTML to PDF applications, etc.

• Greatly improved rendering performance scalability when viewing very large documents or documents with very large text elements.

• New convenience methods to render String content directly have been added to the StormBase class.

• When using Swing toolkit mode, pages now transition cleanly from one to another without blanking to an empty white page in between.

HTML

• A new content selection engine provides support for selecting images and text, greatly improved accuracy and responsiveness when selecting and scrolling with the mouse, and support for selecting content using the keyboard.

• Full support for Drag & Drop. Drag selected text or anchor locations to drop targets, including other native applications. Drop text onto HTML form controls from other Java components or native applications (Swing toolkit only).

• Improved text search capabilities, including support for whole word searching and highlighting all matches in the document.

• Added support for the System Selection Clipboard on platforms that support it (Unix, Linux). All selected text is automatically added to the Selection Clipboard on supported platforms, and can then be pasted into editable text controls via the middle-mouse button.

• Added new Content Selection PropertyChangeEvents to indicate when a content selection is defined or cleared in a viewport.

• Added new Viewport Activated/Deactivated PropertyChangeEvents to indicate when a viewport becomes the active viewport.

• The keyboard shortcut keys for common browser functions have been augmented and aligned with other mainstream browsers. In addition, the keyboard shortcuts now correctly support the Cmd key on the Mac instead of the Ctrl key.

• The timing and sequence of DOM Mouse events emitted by the browser have been aligned with other mainstream browsers. In addition, a problem with the context menu DOM Mouse event has been fixed.

• Improved focus indicator appearance and support is now consistent with mainstream browsers.

• The robustness of the HTML parser has been improved to prevent the possibility of false tag identifications from occurring.

• EMBED tags inside OBJECT tags are now ignored. Previously, both embedded objects would be rendered.

• The content selection colors are now defined by either the system settings (AWT) or the current Swing Look and Feel (L&F) color scheme. System properties can be used to override these defaults.

• HTML Form elements rendered using the Swing WinXP L&F now support CSS styling of background colors and borders correctly.

• Minor issues with keyboard shortcut support in HTML form text input controls have been addressed.

• The RenderingHints system properties (textAntiAliasing, etc.) are now fully dynamic and can be changed without restarting the browser.

• Fixed a problem with the handling of the type attribute of OBJECT tags that prevented the correct pilot for the mime type from being used to render the OBJECT tag content.

• Padding is now properly supported for embedded content, such as OBJECT tags.

• Fixed a problem with incomplete repaints when using ICEbrowser in lightweight mode embedded in an SWT toolkit application.

• A problem that could cause inconsistent behavior when reloading Frameset documents or documents with IFrames has been corrected.

• The optional DOM 2 API support classes have been moved from the ib6extra.jar to the ib6core.jar. However, they must still be configured by the application before they can be used. See "Using the DOM" in Chapter 6 of the ICEbrowser SDK Developer's Guide for more information.

CSS

• Improved CSS support for floating boxes.

• Added support for a single element to have multiple class assignments.

• Improved support for the CSS "content: " property.

• Added optional support for hiding form input widgets when they are partially or fully occluded by a higher z-index box.

• FormInputButtons now support background images (Swing toolkit only).

• Improved the robustness of the CSS parser to allow pages to be viewed even when external .css files fail to load.

• Improved the appearance of dotted and dashed border styles.

Printing

• Enhanced Printing, Page Setup, and Print Preview support, including complete support for selective printing of Frameset documents and printing selected content only.

• Support for JDK 1.1, JDK 1.3, and JDK 1.4 printing APIs.

• Improved Smart Page Breaks algorithm.

Accessibility

• Enhanced the JAWS accessibility mode to optionally announce table layout and numbered and bulleted list information.

• Corrected several issues with the JAWS accessibility support, such as words being truncated in some cases.

Reference Implementations and Examples

    RICommon

• New PrintHelper, SearchHelper, and SearchPanel reference classes makes adding robust, full-featured HTML searching capabilities to your application simple.

• Improved full-featured and localized AWT and Swing Print Preview and Page Setup dialogs.

    Generic RI

• Uses new RICommon Page Setup, Print Preview, and PrintHelper classes.

• Uses new RICommon SearchHelper for robust searching support, including Framesets.

Known Issues

The following are known issues with this release:

• Due to a bug in the JDK 1.4.x printing support, when printing using the ice.ri.common.print.PrintHelper class and JDK 1.4.x, any changes the user makes to the print driver settings via the native Print dialog window will not be reflected in the actual printout. This does work correctly with JDK 1.3.x and JDK 5.0+.

• If you run your ICEbrowser application in a Java Web Start (JWS) environment, when you attempt to retrieve certain remote images via a URL, a SecurityException may occur from the sun.awt.image class, and the URL to the image is redirected. This problem is related to bug 4881229 in Sun's Java Developer's Bug Parade. If the system property ice.util.security.jdk12.urlImageFix is set to true, the SecurityKit sets a custom SecurityManager that should resolve this problem.

• If you are using Linux with JDK 1.4.x, and an HTML page has one charset specified in the META tag and an HTML element specifies a different charset, the default encoding will be used and the characters may not display correctly. To prevent this problem, set the ice.pilots.html4.defaultEncoding system property with an appropriate default encoding for the content being displayed. For example:
  java -Dice.pilots.html4.defaultEncoding="Shift_JIS" ice.browser.main

• Some Web pages, especially under the Microsoft homepage, use JavaScript to instantiate ActiveX objects. ICEbrowser does not support ActiveX components.

Support

For help with this release please contact ICEsoft customer support at http://www.icesoft.com/support/reqsupport.html.

For more information on ICEsoft Technologies, see http://www.icesoft.com.

Copyright ICEsoft Technologies, Inc.