Happy New Year From UniDoc
Happy New Year From UniDoc
2020 was an eventful year for UniDoc, we worked really hard to improve the library according to customer feedback and bring in amazing new features. We released 31 major updates around the year, each bringing additional functionalities and tweaking the old ones according to your feedback.
The focus was not only on the code, we also ramped up our content production and wrote tons of blogs, featured posts and improved our knowledgebase so that it is easier for you to get started using UniDoc’s libraries. You can also check out our YouTube channel where we publish instructional videos on how to achieve the most demanded use cases through UniDoc.
We also revamped our website with an amazing new design with some really cool features. You can contact us through the chat bubble on the website or try out UniDoc libraries through the playground. The playground is pretty cool as it allows you to try out all the functionalities of the libraries without having to set up anything in your local environment allowing you to quickly iterate through ideas and come up with solutions.
All in all, we added tons of features, numerous commits, and improved the quality of the libraries during 2020 and all of this while fighting the pandemic. For UniPDF our first release in 2020 was v3.3.1, in which we introduced the basic support for UTF-16 text encodings and a number of other small tweaks.
Throughout the year, we added support for JBIG2 encoding, font subsetting, table data extraction digital signatures with customized appearance and other features. Similarly, for UniOffice, our first release of 2020 was v1.3.0 in which we significantly enhanced the support for excel formulas, improved our formula parser and added the capability to remove columns from excel files.
Releases of 2020
Here’s a summarized list of all major releases of UniPDF in 2020:
| Date | Version | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 5, 2020 | 3.3.1 | Contains a few notable fixes and improvements. |
| Feb 10, 2020 | 3.4.0 | Adds support for pre-defined CMaps which improves text extraction significantly for many languages, notably for ones using Asian fonts. In addition there are many fixes and improvements. |
| Mar 9, 2020 | 3.5.0 | Adds initial support for rendering, allowing converting PDF to image formats. In addition, there are a few bug fixes with font/encodings and indexed colorspace |
| Apr 7, 2020 | 3.6.0 | Introduces a JBIG2 encoder that can be used for efficient compression of bitonal images and masks. In addition, there are notable bugfixes. |
| May 6, 2020 | 3.7.0 | Introduced font subsetting of composite fonts which enables significant reduction of file sizes for symbolic languages. |
| Jun 16, 2020 | 3.8.0 | Highlights fixes and improvements in form filling. Custom fonts can now be used when filling forms. In addition contains fixes for field appearance generation. Improvements in multi-byte CMap handling for text extraction. |
| Jul 15, 2020 | 3.9.0 | Text extraction of complex layouts such as multiple columns. Table data extraction support. Powerful new PDF optimization techniques implemented including automatic font cleanup and content stream reduction. |
| Aug 28, 2020 | 3.10.0 | Includes a number of fixes, including substantial performance improvements |
| Sep 7, 2020 | 3.11.0 | Poly shapes drawing in the creator package |
| Sep 22, 2020 | 3.12.0 | Added document timestamp signature handler option |
| Oct 19, 2020 | 3.13.0 | Support for adding digital signature appearance with an image, or a combination of image and text, with a watermark option. Example: pdf_image_sign_appearance.go |
| Nov 12, 2020 | 3.14.0 | Long-term validation LTV signature support. New examples: https://github.com/unidoc/unipdf-examples/tree/master/signatures/ltv |
| Nov 24, 2020 | 3.15.0 | Support for custom document properties and metadata. |
| Dec 7, 2020 | 3.16.0 | Enhanced wrapping support for cells with long content so that they can wrap across pages. |
You can checkout the releases of UniOffice over here.
Checkout our blogs
If you haven’t already, take a look at our blogs, they will help you get started using the library and cover all of the important use cases. You can learn how to automate invoicing, create tables, deal with PDF forms, and learn a whole lot more about UniPDF and its use cases. Just check out our blog on our website.
Here are some other notable posts that you can check:
The 5 Crucial PDF and Office Features For Corporate Apps in Pure Go link
Extracting Meaning from PDF Files in Pure Go link
Creating PDF Reports in Golang link
What’s Next?
We started 2021 with the release v3.17.0. With this release, we added a timestamping client, made some improvements in text extraction, fixed some bugs and improved the functionalities of a number of other features.
In 2020, we added the optional premium support, we also plan on adding the option of choosing SaaS service options and a bunch of other services. The premium support offers priority issue support, access to source code and custom work. The SaaS service option entails full access to all our libraries as a paid per use metered subscription and it comes with a free tier so you can get started easily.
For 2021, we plan on expanding UniDoc’s horizons to new avenues and plan on introducing UniHTML and UniOCR. We plan on expanding our services to the cloud and follow the SaaS model. UniHTML will be launching in the first half of 2021 and will allow you to transform HTML into beautifully formatted PDF files.
Conclusion
Happy new year from the UniDoc family and hope you are staying well during the pandemic. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with the latest development and if you have a query, just use the chat bubble on the website or contact us through the form. If you want to request an additional feature, open an issue on our repository and we will look into it ASAP.