This week we are pleased to announce the release of Prince 8.1, now available for download.

The major new feature in this release is CSS3 Transforms, which can be used to rotate, scale, and transform HTML elements to achieve powerful new layouts.

Other changes include additions to the JavaScript DOM to support more scripts, and an experimental new HTML5 parser. Full details are available in the release notes.

Thank you to all the people who have tried Prince and given us suggestions and feedback on how we can make it even better!

WOHO! Support for column-span: all! I'm doing a happy dance now.

Two quick caveats: currently column-span does not work properly on tables, so you need to wrap them up in another block element like a <div> and apply the column-span to that. Also, column-span on nested blocks can result in some content disappearing, so it is best to apply the property to block elements that appear at the top level, eg. as direct children of the element that defines the multi-column layout. Both of these issues will be fixed in the next maintenance release of Prince.

How long is the estimated time for the maintenance release? I'm currently building the CSS for an (At the moment) 5500 page document, would take a while to manually search for disappearing content.

Which platform are you running Prince on? We may be able to fast-track new builds for MacOS X and Windows.

Currently running it on OS X and Ubuntu (Project crashed when running in prince for Windows, didn't really like the 10+ minutes of rendering), would be great to get a new build for OS X.

We have created an updated build for MacOS X, available here: prince-8.1r2-macosx.tar.gz.

Thank you! I do get a "prince: /usr/local/lib/prince/license/license.dat: warning: inapplicable license" error now, but it renders (With the watermark, but thats how it should be, havn't bought the license yet).

Oops, yes the license error message is a small mistake on our side. I've updated the MacOS X package to fix this. Thanks for letting me know.