HexaPDF 0.3.0 - TTF Font Subsetting and CLI enhancements Published on Wednesday, 25 January 2017

This third release is about two major features: TrueType font subsetting support and CLI enhancements.

But before we come to them I want to ask you for your help: I launched a Patreon site to fund further development of HexaPDF. Especially if you are a company interested in the prospects of HexaPDF, you might want to sponsor HexaPDF because I intend to change the license to MIT once I reach a certain goal! So help me reach that goal — Become a Patron!

With the introduction of TrueType font subsetting, PDF files using the HexaPDF::Content::Canvas API will now be much smaller when TrueType fonts are used. HexaPDF does font subsetting by default now but this can be disabled on a font-by-font basis, see HexaPDF::FontLoader::FromConfiguration::call.

The other major overhaul was with respect to the hexapdf application. The hexapdf modify command was split into three individual commands to allow easier use:

hexapdf modify for modifying an existing file,

for modifying an existing file, hexapdf merge for merging multiple PDF files into a single PDF file, and

for merging multiple PDF files into a single PDF file, and hexapdf optimize for easily optimizing PDF files.

Additionally, the hexapdf extract command was renamed to hexapdf files since a new hexapdf images command was added. The later can be used to list or extract images embedded in a PDF file.

The HexaPDF library itself also gained some new features, the most important one being the correct handling of hybrid-reference PDF files. Most of you won’t know what these special PDF files are but if you have used HexaPDF before and a file was corrupted when writing, there is a good chance that the input file was such a hybrid-reference file.

As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of the changes.