Prince News

• (2005-08): Prince 5.0 beta 4 released
• (2005-07): Prince 5.0 beta 3 released
• (2005-06-28): Web pioneer Håkon Wium Lie joins YesLogic's board
• (2005-06): Prince 5.0 beta 2 released
• (2005-05): Prince 5.0 beta 1 released
• (2004-10): Prince 4.0 released
• (2004-05): Prince 3.1 released
• (2003-12): Prince 3.0 released
• (2003-06): Prince 2.1 released
• (2003-05): Prince 2.0 released
• (2003-04): Prince 1.0 released

Prince 5.0 beta 4 – August 2005

Release notes:

• Support for XML Inclusions (XInclude).
• Support for specifying page size in pixels.
• Support for specifying root element height as a percentage.
• Improvements to margin collapsing.
• Improvements to stacking order.
• Improvements to float positioning.
• Improvements to absolute positioning.
• Fixed bug affecting font scanning on MacOS X.
• Fixed bug affecting relative positioning and nested spans.
• Fixed bug affecting vertical margins on page floats.
• Fixed bug affecting min-height and max-height properties.
• Fixed bug affecting vertical-align on inline blocks.

Prince 5.0 beta 3 – July 2005

Release notes:

• Support for word-spacing property.
• Support for visibility property.
• Support for empty-cells property.
• Support for clip property.
• Support for table captions, table columns and column groups.
• Table cells/rows longer than one page will now be split.
• Improvements to background-repeat property.
• Improvements to vertical alignment for inline tables and inline blocks.
• Improvements to handling of blocks inside inline boxes.
• Windows GUI now remembers last path used to open files.

Web pioneer Håkon Wium Lie joins YesLogic's board

(2005-06-28) YesLogic Pty Ltd today announced that Håkon Wium Lie, a noted web pioneer, has joined YesLogic as director. YesLogic is the creator of Prince, a formatter which converts XML-based content to PDF. Prince supports many W3C formats, including XML, XHTML and SVG, and formats content according to style sheets written in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Håkon Wium Lie proposed the concept of CSS in 1994 while working at CERN, the cradle of the web.

"Prince is a great way of getting web content onto paper. I decided to join the Prince effort after using it to format my book and PhD thesis. Prince makes an old dream come true: content can be authored using common web standards, and different style sheets describe how the content is presented on different devices. Prince produces beautiful PDF documents for printing," says Håkon Wium Lie.

"We are happy to welcome Håkon on board," says YesLogic founder and CEO Michael Day. "Prince takes XML and CSS further than any other product and we are delighted to attract a person so central in the web standards community. Håkon will be important in further developing the Prince formatter, and in ensuring that it continues to support the high standards of the web."

About YesLogic

YesLogic Pty Ltd is a software company based in Melbourne, Australia. The Prince formatter is its flagship product. Prince is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS and can run on the server side or as a client. For more information, see: http://www.princexml.com/ http://www.yeslogic.com/

About Håkon Wium Lie

Håkon Wium Lie is the CTO of Opera Software in Oslo, Norway. Before joining Opera in 1999, he was a technical staff member at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Håkon Wium Lie has been named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, and Technology Review named him as one of 100 top innovators for the next century in 1999.

Prince 5.0 beta 2 – June 2005

Release notes:

• Added bookmark-target property to control PDF bookmark links.
• Support for xml:id attribute for cross-references and links.
• Support for :first page class on named page groups.
• Support for alternate and media attributes on xml-stylesheet instructions.
• Added --verbose option to list all loaded style sheets, fonts and images.
• Fixed bug with URL resolution in CSS style sheets.
• Fixed bug affecting colors in some GIF images.
• Fixed bug affecting incorrect empty namespace declarations.
• Fixed bug with embedding images inside display: none elements.

Prince 5.0 beta 1 – May 2005

Release notes:

• New Windows GUI with preview
• MacOS X command-line support
• Automatic font detection on all platforms
• Support for a wide range of UNICODE characters
• Optional PDF encryption with choice of 40 or 128-bit key size
• PDF links, bookmarks and metadata
• Support for GIF images and grayscale JPEG and PNG images
• Page headers/footers can use document content via string-set property
• Improvements to paged media duplex printing support
• Support for page floats
• Support for footnotes
• Support for cross-references
• Support for CSS positioning (relative/absolute/fixed)
• Support for letter-spacing property
• Support for min-width, max-width, min-height, max-height properties
• Support for overflow property
• Extended support for white-space property
• Extended support for line-height property

Prince 4.0 – October 2004

Release notes:

• Automatic table layout and shrink-to-fit float layout.
• Applies CSS specified in XHTML style attribute.
• Applies CSS specified in XHTML <style> element.
• Applies CSS referenced by XHTML <link> element.
• Compresses PDF files to save space and time.
• Embeds TrueType fonts in PDF files for accurate printing.
• Supports separated and collapsed table border models.
• Supports row-span and column-span properties on table cells.
• Supports auto margins for block alignment.
• Supports negative margins for flexible block positioning.
• Supports scaling images and SVG using width and height properties.
• Supports text-transform property for lowercase/uppercase transforms.
• Supports page-break-inside property for avoiding page breaks inside a block.
• Supports new display type for run-in headings.
• Supports the soft-hyphen character for controlling word hyphenation.
• Updated counter scope conforms to revised CSS specification.
• Fixes list item marker layout to conform to CSS specification.

Prince 3.1 – May 2004

Release notes:

• Improved support for SVG shapes and text.
• Supports vertical alignment including subscript and superscript.
• Supports backgrounds on pages.
• Supports advanced line height properties.
• Strips leading newlines from preformatted text.
• Fixes incorrect display of some PNG images.
• Fixes incorrect application of attribute selectors.
• Fixes incorrect calculation of percentage line heights.
• Fixes incorrect colors in SVG.
• Fixes incorrect order of text-decoration drawing.
• Fixes incorrect display of unknown counters.

Prince 3.0 – December 2003

Release notes:

• Supports images in JPEG, PNG and TIFF format.
• Supports new CSS3 Paged Media properties.
• Preserves white space in preformatted text.
• Handles relative font sizes, indents, margins, padding and borders.
• Renders inline blocks and inline tables.
• Loads entities from an external DTD catalog.
• Improved style sheets for XHTML and DocBook.

Prince 2.1 – June 2003

Release notes:

• Applies suitable default style sheets automatically
• Convenient interface for applying user style sheets
• Correct priorities for default, user and author style sheets
• DocBook style sheet supports itemizedlist and variablelist
• Now also runs on Red Hat Linux 7.3
• @import correctly handles relative file paths
• xml-stylesheet correctly handles absolute file paths
• Fixes incorrect default style sheet handling on Windows
• Fixes incorrect treatment of line-break-before property
• Fixes incorrect margin collapsing with floating blocks

Prince 2.0 – May 2003

Release notes:

• Graphical User Interface for Microsoft Windows™
• Multi-Column Layout and Floating Blocks
• Lists, Counters and Generated Content
• Page Headers / Footers and Duplex Printing
• Many additional CSS properties and selectors
• Support for the xml-stylesheet processing instruction

Prince 1.0 – April 2003

Release notes:

• First public release of Prince!