HexaPDF 0.4.0 - Composite Font Support and many CLI enhancements Published on Sunday, 19 March 2017

HexaPDF continues to grow and mature, with this release bringing composite font support and many CLI enhancements.

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Texts in PDF can be created using simple fonts or composite fonts where composite fonts are much more capable, allowing the use of fonts in the OpenType font format and vertical writing. HexaPDF already produced text using the composite font PDF structures and with this release it is also able to handle composite fonts for text extraction and such.

On the CLI side I got requests for better verbosity control and batch processing. Therefore I created a new hexapdf batch command that can be used to execute a command on several PDF files.

This is especially useful when dealing with small files since the startup overhead is gone: When running hexapdf batch 'info {}' on my set of test files, it takes only about 14 seconds compared to 150 seconds running hexapdf info the usual way!

Additionally, in-place processing of PDF files is now possible and embedded TrueType fonts can be optimized, sometimes leading to big file size improvements.

Memory usage and text generation performance has been improved, too. HexaPDF is now about as fast as Prawn in raw text output when using the standard PDF fonts, and much faster when using TrueType fonts, while generating smaller files. Have a look at the text rendering benchmark to see the whole comparison and some caveats.

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

For the next release I will concentrate on bringing more advanced text features to HexaPDF, like box layouting and support for kerning. If you have a request, drop me an e-mail or open an issue!