http://bfo.co.uk News from the Big Faceless Organization en-GB Thu, 3 Jul 2008 12:15:00 GMT 60 BFO have released an update to their Graph Library. This release fixes a number of minor rendering problems that could cause some minor visual facets, and it's faster too. For output to SVG and PDF, or when plotting many thousands of polygons this version can be up to 30% faster - less so when plotting to PNG (as most of the time is in the image compression). The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the Graph Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 3 Jul 2008 12:15:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/29 BFO have released an update to their PDF Library. This release has a large number of bug fixes that have accumulated over the last couple of months, and includes some large changes to the viewer - PDF documents can be rearranged or concatenated inside the viewer. The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:45:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/28 BFO have released an update to their Graph Library. This release has a few new features and bug fixes, and also has some improvements to the licensing code to make rollouts easier. As always, the new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the Graph Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:45:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/27 BFO have released a major update to their PDF Library. The main feature of this version is big improvements to speed and memory when reading PDF's, due largely to a switch from a single to a multi-threaded architecture and use of the java.nio package where possible. For large documents the improvements are enormous, but we'd encourage everyone to upgrade as there are benefits across the board. BarCodes have been completely redone, and there are a large number of other improvements including several more localizations for the viewer component. The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Wed, 06 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/26 BFO have released an update to their PDF Library. This release has a few bug fixes but is mainly all about JavaScript. If you're running Java 1.6 or have a recent build of Mozilla Rhino, the PDF Viewer now has fairly complete support for JavaScript - which means that documents with custom field validation should work largely as they do in Acrobat (and for those that don't yet, we'll be expanding the range of JavaScript objects supported over the coming releases). There are also some changes to the FormChoice object which may require some minor changes to your code if you're manipulating the list of options directly. As always, the new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:45:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/25 BFO have released an update to their Report Generator. The new release is built on the PDF library 2.8.5, so has all the new features and bug fixes of that release. The new releases are available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the Report Generator changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/report/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Report%20Generator%20Change%20Log Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/24 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. The new release includes improvements for documents saved with Acrobat Reader Usage Rights - the PDF library can now read and write those documents without damaging those rights. A number of refinements have been made to the Viewer, which now supports LiveConnect for communication with JavaScript and has drastically reduced memory requirements when displaying PDF's containing very large or high resolution bitmap images. There's also a number of bug fixes across the board. The new releases are available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/23 BFO have released an update to their PDF library and Report Generator. Primarily a bug fix release, it fixes a memory leak (our first in 18 months) occurring when certain multibyte OpenType fonts were used in forms. We'd encourage all customers to upgrade. Other improvements relate to PDF/A support and reading certain rare types of TIFF image. The new releases are available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:15:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/22 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. Version 2.8.3 adds improvements to deployment, the ability to submit forms online through the viewer and a number of viewer improvements when dealing with documents requiring public key management, ie digitally signed or encrypted PDFs. There are also a few minor improvements and bug fixes. The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk/products/pdf. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Mon, 7 Aug 2007 12:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/21 BFO have released an update to their Graph library. Version 2.3.2 adds improved support for labels, image and markers, specifically improved support when they're used on bar series and the ability to make labels hypertext links. There are also some bug fixes. The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk/products/graph. See the Graph Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Fri, 3 Aug 2007 12:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/20 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. Version 2.8.2 is significant in that it's been optimized for use in a Java Web Start or Applet environment by splitting the Jar into 3 smaller Jars, and a "pack200" compressed Jar is supplied as well. This reduces the initial download when using the Viewer in those environments from 4.0MB to 670KB, a huge improvement. Other improvements include improved support for Public Key encryption, both in the API itself and the viewer, a fix for a long-standing bug when merging documents, and the Lucene support has at long last been upgraded to work with Lucene 2.0 The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk/products/pdf. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Mon, 9 Jul 2007 17:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/19 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. Version 2.8.1 has a large number of improvements including: formatting of form fields (now your currency and date fields will be formatted as they are in Acrobat), changes to digital signatures to work around quirks in the Sun and IAIK JCE providers (which now work on all signatures), plus a number of bug fixes chiefly relating to text extraction and rendering. The Report Generator has also been updated to include these fixes. The new releases are available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk/products/pdf and http://bfo.co.uk/products/report. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/18 BFO have released an update to their Graph library. Version 2.3.1 contains support for "dial" or "meter" graphs, some new web services for creating graphs directly from a form submission, as well as bug fixes relating to plotting dates and other areas. The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk/products/graph. See the Graph library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Tue, 5 Jun 2007 15:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/17 BFO have released an major update to their PDF library. Version 2.8 contains a complete redesign of the Viewer package, a collection of Swing components that can be used to display a PDF. The new viewer is designed around a pluggable architecture allowing it to be easily customized to function as a PDF viewer or PDF editor, and further extensions can also be written very easily for custom PDF workflows. The new release ships with components that enable forms to be completed, digital signatures to be applied or verified and more, as well as allowing the document to be saved - bringing some of Acrobat's form completion features to Java Swing. The new release is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk/products/pdf, where you can also view a demonstration of the viewer running as an Applet. See the PDF library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 24 May 2007 00:20:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/16 BFO have released an update to their Report Generator library. Version 1.1.35 is a rebuild incorporating the new PDF library 2.7.9, which will benefit anyone creating documents in the Pashto langauge as well as those requiring bugfixes applied to the PDF library in the last 2 months. See the Report Generator changelog for more information. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/report/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Report%20Generator%20Change%20Log Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:40:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/15 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. Version 2.7.9 is primarily a bugfix release and includes improvements to FDF, XFDF and XFA handling. It also includes support for JBIG2 compression via an external encoder, complementing the JBIG2 decompression support added in the last release. This can drastically reduce the size of PDFs containing 1-bit images. See the PDF library changelog for more information. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:40:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/14 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. Version 2.7.8 includes enhancements to the viewer to make life easier for those building interactive viewers, and improvements to the text extraction routines to reassemble words broken up by the PDF structure. Other enhancements include JBIG2 decoding (via an external decoder), and numerous small improvements and bug fixes. See the PDF library changelog for more information. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/13 BFO have released an update to their PDF library and Report Generator. Version 2.7.7 of the PDF library contains a large number of rendering improvements and fixes for some unusual PDF documents. It also contains a number of changes designed to reduce the load on Java Permanent Generation and peak memory use, which we hope will help some customers. The Report Generator contains a couple of minor bug fixes but is largely a rebuild to take advantage of these changes. See the PDF library changelog for more information. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Mon, 5 Feb 2007 16:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/12 BFO have released an update to their Graph library. This adds a number of bug fixes and enhancements for some customers pushing the library in unusual directions - particularly those making heavy use of multi bar graphs with labels. We've also added a new "box" tag for adding arbitrary rectangles to the graph, and you can now plot zero-width slices in a Pie Graph - an incompatible change, which is why we're at 2.3 rather than 2.2.5. See the Graph Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:20:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/12 BFO have released an update to their PDF library and Report Generator. Version 2.7.6 of the PDF library boasts a large speed increase when reading documents - around 25% for large files - as well as improved support for Acrobat 8.0 features (including digital signatures and duplex printing) and an array of minor bugfixes. Version 1.1.33 of the Report Generator takes advantage of the new features added to the PDF library in recent months - we know the improved support for Polish and other ISO-8859-2 languages is eagerly awaited by a number of clients. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:45:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/11 Big Faceless has moved a couple of miles across London to Chelsea. Our new address is at Worlds End Studios, 132-134 Lots Road, London SW10 0RJ, and our new phone number is +44-20-73497053. Please update your records as necessary. http://big.faceless.org/contact.jsp Wed, 6 Dec 2006 12:11:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/10 BFO have released an update to their PDF library - a bugfix release addressing two issues added in 2.7.4. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Fri, 9 Nov 2006 12:15:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/9 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. The major feature of the new 2.7.4 release is support for creating and verifying Certified documents. Added in Acrobat 7, certifying signatures allow limits to be placed on the types of changes that can be made to a PDF after it's been signed. Other changes are mainly below the hood - for reading large documents, we've reduced the time and memory required by about 10%, and there are a few bugfixes as well. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:20:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/8 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. The new 2.7.3 release sports a largely rewritten font encoding section, which means fonts encoded using a slightly unusual approach will still display correctly in the viewer. Support for Chinese/Japanese/Korean is improved for documents not using Unicode-based encoding, and the StandardFonts can now access some more characters - very useful for those creating documents in Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and other langauges in the ISO-8859-2 block. Other changes include support for the larger documents it's possible to create since Acrobat 6 and several smaller bugfixes relating to rendering images and fonts. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:20:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/7 BFO have released an update to their PDF library and Report Generator. The new PDF library features better support for XFA, including XFA barcode fields, and many bugfixes and improvements when rendering, the results of intensive testing over many hundreds of PDFs by the BFO team. The Report Generator has been updated as well to take advantage of the new PDF library. See the PDF Library changelog for more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Wed, 13 Sep 2006 13:35:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/6 BFO have released an update to their Graph library. Version 2.2.4 has improvements to the JavaScript used to handle rollovers, restores the ability to run under Java 1.3, and uses a better default font on UNIX. The documentation layout has also been improved. The Graph Library changelog has more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:40:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/5 BFO have released an update to their PDF library. Version 2.7.1 adds the ability to apply RFC3161 timestamps to Digital Signatures, to digitally sign documents remotely via a web service, and the source code to the entire viewer package has now been released. There are also improvements to TIFF rendering, PDF/A support, XFA and a few bugfixes. The PDF Library changelog has more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:23:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/4 There's a new release of the Graph Library (2.2.3) and Report Generator (1.1.31). These releases enable the two product to integrate more easily - you can now embed Graphs created with version 2 of the Graph Library into the Report Generator quite easily. The Graph Library changelog has more details. http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/graph/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=Graph%20Library%20Change%20Log Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:00:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/3 We've just added an RSS feed of updates to the website. Whenever a new version is released or more information added to the site we'll be updating this feed, so if you want to keep track of what's happening in BFO's product range, subscribe! Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:49:00 GMT http://bfo.co.uk/rss/2 BFO announces the release of their 2.7 release of the PDF library. For full details please see the changelog. Tue, 18 Jul 2006 12:00:00 GMT http://big.faceless.org/viewtext.jsp?url=products/pdf/docs/CHANGELOG.txt&title=PDF%20Library%20Change%20Log http://bfo.co.uk/rss/1