RealObjects and 4D CONCEPT strengthen OEM partnership

Saarbrücken, Germany and Paris, France – RealObjects, a leading provider of W3C standard-compliant software tools for electronic publishing, content authoring and web-to-print, and 4D CONCEPT, a prominent player in documentation engineering in France, are proud to announce the expansion of their OEM partnership. The partnership, which originally started in 2017, has been expanded to provide PDFreactor functionality to an even larger 4D CONCEPT customer base.

4D CONCEPT now uses RealObjects’ PDFreactor not only in its ADAM Software Suite, but also in the DITA Software Suite. This extension of the partnership will enable 4D CONCEPT to provide its customers with a comprehensive solution for producing, capitalizing, organizing, and publishing cross-media information through XML technologies.

“Our partnership with 4D CONCEPT has been a great success, and we are thrilled to expand it,” said Michael Jung, Managing Director Sales & Business Development of RealObjects. “By leveraging our expertise in HTML to PDF conversion, we can offer our clients innovative, web standard compliant and typeset quality PDF generation that meet their evolving needs.”

“After its successful integration into ADAM Suite, we are delighted to further strengthen our OEM partnership by featuring PDFReactor in DITA Factory.” said Yves Mangili, CEO of 4D CONCEPT. “PDFreactor is fully W3C compliant, and therefore, combined with our editorial systems, it provides our customers with the most advanced cross-media information management solution on the market.”

The expanded OEM partnership between RealObjects and 4D CONCEPT will also provide 4D CONCEPT’s DITA FACTORY Software Suite customers with powerful HTML to PDF functionality that will help them stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly changing world of cross-media information management.

About RealObjects

RealObjects (www.realobjects.com), founded in 2000, provides W3C standard-compliant, cross platform software tools for electronic publishing, content authoring and web-to-print.

Its W3C standards-based publishing solution PDFreactor is an industry-recognized flagship product, which is used for server-side conversion of HTML to PDF whenever electronic and typeset-quality print output of business content is required. It is the perfect printing component for web applications, incl. database publishing, web-to-print, PIM, DMS, MDM, DAM, WCMS, VDP etc.

RealObjects products are used by about 3000 corporate customers in over 40 countries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, educational institutions as well as government and nonprofit organizations. Several OEM and VAR partners as well as major accounts have deeply integrated RealObjects technology into their toolsets and solutions.

About 4D CONCEPT

4D CONCEPT (www.4DCONCEPT.fr) is an expert in document engineering, a software publisher at the cutting edge of technology and concerned with innovation, for all types of technical editing.

4D CONCEPT has developed three software products based on the same concepts: easy to deploy, and making technical authoring and publishing simple and affordable.

ADAM SUITE is a document workshop for aerospace and defense based on ASD standards: S1000D, S2000M, S3000L for maintenance information and ATA2300 for flight operations. Airbus, Dassault Aviation, Naval Group, Arquus and many others trust ADAM SUITE.

DITA FACTORY is an end-to-end, off-the-shelf editorial suite that simplifies the production of user and technical documentation, manages data, and provides online editing capabilities to review, cross-media publish, and distribute content. DITA FACTORY is available with full automotive specialization used by major French manufacturers.

Contact:
Michael Jung
RealObjects, Managing Director
michael.jung@realobjects.com
Tel. +49 681 985 790

Long-standing OEM partnership between RealObjects and K15t – PDFreactor® leverages Scroll PDF Exporter and enables professionally styled PDF exports directly from Atlassian Confluence

Since the start of K15t’s partnership with RealObjects and the use of PDFreactor® within Scroll PDF Exporter, the app has been able to develop into a mainstay for generating PDF file format exports from Atlassian Confluence. The PDFreactor® library is a powerful tool for generating high-quality PDFs from HTML documents, and switching to this library opened up further feature possibilities that could be utilized in the app. This change has benefited both the users of the app in Confluence and also those at K15t who develop, maintain, and support the app.

The selection to use the PDFreactor® library came after evaluation of many other alternatives, but none of which could outperform the reliability and consistency for converting HTML documents into professionally styled PDFs. The decision to use the library was made much easier due to PDFreactor® providing advanced support for page layouting and CSS styling. Additionally it provides fine control over what kind of network and file access is allowed during a conversion which Scroll PDF Exporter has been able to capitalize on for enhanced security.

The key benefits of using the PDFreactor® library lie within its ability to accurately render complex layouts and designs, providing extensive customization options and offering a range of advanced options for scalability, export stability and security. Subsequently, export templates created in Scroll PDF Exporter can be applied to Confluence content ensuring that users have full control over the appearance of the PDF output. Overall, the combination of Scroll PDF Exporter and RealObjects PDFreactor® makes it easy for Atlassian Confluence users to export their pages as professionally styled PDF documents. Together they form a powerful and reliable tool for anyone looking to create high-quality PDFs from Atlassian Confluence.

Please also read the related case study.

About K15t

K15t is a software company based in Stuttgart Germany, that specializes in developing solutions for Atlassian products, such as Jira and Confluence. As an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner, K15t offers a range of apps and integrations that enhance the functionality of these tools. K15t helps teams to unleash the potential of their products and creates solutions to help them better educate and enable their customers. The Scroll Apps for Confluence help teams modernize how they author and manage content and
documentation, while Backbone Issue Sync for Jira enables project collaboration across departmental and B2B boundaries. In addition, Orderly Databases for Confluence Cloud supports keeping content structured and consistent across Confluence.

About RealObjects

RealObjects (www.realobjects.com), founded in 2000, provides W3C standard-compliant, cross platform software tools for electronic publishing, content authoring and web-to-print.

Its W3C standards-based publishing solution PDFreactor is an industry-recognized flagship product, which is used for server-side conversion of HTML to PDF whenever electronic and typeset-quality print output of business content is required. It is the perfect printing component for web applications, incl. database publishing, web-to-print, PIM, DMS, MDM, DAM, WCMS, VDP etc.

RealObjects tools have been used by about 3000 corporate customers in over 40 countries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, educational institutions as well as government and non-profit organizations. Several major accounts have deeply integrated RealObjects technology into their toolsets and solutions. A network of strategic business alliances, resellers and OEM partners/customers has been established over the years.

Contact:

Michael Jung
RealObjects, Managing Director
michael.jung@realobjects.com
Tel. +49 681 985 790

PDFreactor 11.6 now available

The leading HTML to PDF conversion engine just got even better: PDFreactor 11.6 is now available.

PDFreactor 11.6 is a minor update with great new features and improvements:

The following issues were fixed:
  • If the first word in a line with “word-wrap: break-word” overflows and consists of multiple elements
    (e.g. a <span> starts inside it), it is erroneously broken to the next line at the boundary of the element. (#8828)
  • In rare cases, documents that reset page counters on named pages and are changed via JavaScript
    may cause exceptions being logged and have incorrect page numbering. (#8805)
  • Negative bottom margins on a block elements may cause premature page breaks. (#8825)
  • Forcing multi-column breaks may cause superfluous layouts with no impact on the result. (#5946)

For a full list of features, changes and fixes see the changelog.

Important release notes und upgrading information can be found in the readme.

The PDFreactor 11 installation packages are available for download in the download area.

PDFreactor 11.5 now available

The leading HTML to PDF conversion engine just got even better: PDFreactor 11.5 is now available.

PDFreactor 11.5 is a minor update with great new features and improvements:

The following features and changes were implemented:
  • The PDFreactor Web Service now defaults to a flat structure for temporary documents,
    improving support for document folders shared between instances. (#8783)
  • Barcode dimensions do not always match the visual size of the content. (#8732)
  • The JRE bundled with certain installer packages was updated to 17.0.4.1.
  • The realobjects/pdfreactor Docker image now includes a JRE instead of a JDK.
  • Also moved from AdoptOpenJDK 15.0.2 to Adoptium Eclipse Temurin 17.0.4.1. (#8788)
  • Updated realobjects/pdfreactor Docker image from Oracle Linux Server 8.3 to 9.0.
  • Various dependency updates.
The following issues were fixed:
  • Updated Jetty server of PDFreactor Web Service. (CVE-2022-2047, CVE-2022-2048)
  • Using the “clip-path” property causes exceptions on boxes with zero “border-radius”. (#8797)
  • Extremely low font sizes in scaled down documents may cause exceptions. (#8780)
  • Certain rare table constructs can cause exceptions. (#8756)
  • Percentage widths of images with max-height are ignored in some situations. (#8790)
  • In some cases percentage widths in single column flex items are resolved incorrectly. (#8775)
  • Certain combinations of SVG effects are tiled incorrectly. (#8696)
  • PDFs used as images or background images are misaligned in some cases. (#8760, #8789)
  • Clipping/cropping paths of images are misaligned for background images. (#8655)
  • Gradient backgrounds are missing for line-split boxes. (#8768)
  • Empty CSS media query lists are not supported. (#8767)
  • Command line only applies debug mode when a debug dump directory is specified. (#8791)
  • Linux systems without a font configuration installed cause exceptions. (#8615)
  • File locks are retained after conversions merging existing PDFs. (#8787)

For a full list of features, changes and fixes see the changelog.

Important release notes und upgrading information can be found in the readme.

The PDFreactor 11 installation packages are available for download in the download area.

PDFreactor 11 Hotfix Release 11.4.7 now available

A hotfix release for PDFreactor 11 is now available.

The following issues were fixed:

  • SVGs in page margin boxes cause conversions to terminate with exceptions. (#8689)
  • Bookmarks in iframes cause conversions to terminate with exceptions. (#8700)
  • PDF conformances that prohibit transparency cause conversions to terminate with exceptions when no license key is used. (#8662)
  • Text in iframes does not reflect all styles, e.g. ignores letter-spacing, when using Java 9 or newer. (#8637)
  • Updated included Java, if any, to mitigate multiple CVEs.
  • Updated Jackson dependencies to mitigate CVE-2020-36518.
  • Updated Spring dependencies of PDFreactor Web Service to mitigate CVE-2022-22968.
  • Updated CXF dependencies of PDFreactor Web Service to mitigate CVE-2021-40690.

For a full list of changes and corrections see the changelog.

Important release notes und upgrading information can be found in the readme.

The PDFreactor 11 installation packages are available for download in the download area.

Important information regarding Spring Framework CVE-2022-22965

RealObjects is actively responding to the reported remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2022-22965 in the Spring Framework Java library aka “Spring4Shell” (https://www.lunasec.io/docs/blog/spring-rce-vulnerabilities/). We are investigating and analyzing if and how our products and services may be impacted by this vulnerability.

As of now we have identified, that part of our products (PDFreactor Web Service) might be affected by this vulnerability. The vulnerability is mitigated with the PDFreactor 11.4.6 release (released on 2022-04-01) which contains updated and no longer affected Spring Framework dependencies.

Important: When using PDFreactor as a Java library, you are not affected by CVE-2022-22965.
If you are using an older version of PDFreactor, the vulnerability can be mitigated by the customer by replacing the affected libraries (at your own discretion, list of library files below) in “$InstallDir/jetty/lib/ext/core” with unaffected versions.

spring-aop-5.x.yy.jar
spring-beans-5.x.yy.jar
spring-context-5.x.yy.jar
spring-core-5.x.yy.jar
spring-expression-5.x.yy.jar
spring-web-5.x.yy.jar

For PDFreactor 10.2 we recommend to update to Spring Framework 5.2.20

For PDFreactor versions below 10.2 we recommend to update to the latest major version or at least PDFreactor 10.2 and then replacing the affected Spring Framework libraries as mentioned above.

You can download the required files here: https://repo.spring.io/ui/native/release/org/springframework/spring/

Important information regarding Log4j CVE-2021-44228

RealObjects is actively responding to the reported remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 in the Apache Log4j 2 Java library aka “Log4Shell” (https://www.lunasec.io/docs/blog/log4j-zero-day/). We are investigating and analyzing if and how our products and services may be impacted by this vulnerability.

So far, we do not believe our current products are vulnerable to exploitation in their default shipping configuration. The Log4j library is not shipped with PDFreactor and the Log4j library is not a required dependency. Our own code does not use Log4j at all. In addition neither the PDFreactor Web Service nor the official PDFreactor Docker image contain Log4j.

However, at this time we can’t rule out that third-party libraries we use in PDFreactor might make use of the Log4j library if it can be found in the Java classpath. So if you have Log4j in the Java classpath of your PDFreactor instance, you must make sure to take the necessary steps described at https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/security.html to mitigate the potential risk.

We will continue to monitor and investigate this issue and update this information as needed.

PDFreactor 11.4 now available

The leading HTML to PDF conversion engine just got even better: PDFreactor 11.4 is now available.

PDFreactor 11.4 is a minor update with great new features and improvements:

The following features and changes were implemented:
  • Improved quality of image downsizing for image output, especially for factors of more than 2. (#8498)
  • Table root elements now support the “min-width” and “max-width” CSS properties. (#8450)
  • Grid layouts now support baseline alignment. (#8395)
  • Improved handling of the parameters of the CSS function “var”. It is now possible to specify a fallback that contains commas or spaces. (#8482)
The following issues were fixed:
  • Multi-column layouts are not supported inside grid items. (#8437)
  • CSS style properties of a page margin box are not applied, if they use CSS variables. (#8486)
  • Updated Xerces, solving CVE-2012-0881. (#8489)
  • Security setting “hideVersionInfo” does not hide the version in PDF metadata. (#8490)
  • CSS style sheets that cannot be loaded via @import rules cause an exception. (#8461)

For a full list of features, changes and fixes see the changelog.

Important release notes und upgrading information can be found in the readme.

The PDFreactor 11 installation packages are available for download in the download area.

PDFreactor 11.3 now available

The leading HTML to PDF conversion engine just got even better: PDFreactor 11.3 is now available.

PDFreactor 11.3 is a minor update with great new features and improvements:

The following features and changes were implemented:
  • FusionCharts is now supported. (#5348)
  • Support for validation of PDF/UA documents. (#8269)
  • Preliminary support for WebP. (#7795)
  • Form fields, incl. signature fields, can now be set to “read-only” or “required”. (#8372)
  • New custom properties to tweak the clickable area of links and the scroll target of bookmarks and internal links. (#8371)
The following issues were fixed:
  • Non-content strings in PDF tagging, like Alt-texts, ignore non-Latin characters. (#8344)
  • Base64 data URIs fail to decode if they contain spaces. (#8423)
  • Redirected document URLs are not used as default base URL. (#8397)
  • Hyphenation of some non-lowercased words is incorrect. (#8415)
  • JavaScript “String()” and “new String()” ignore “toString” functions. (#8436)
  • PDF tagging for elements with z-index can cause exceptions. (#8413)
  • Overriding the tagging of list items can cause invalid PDF tag tree structure. (#8406)
  • PDF/UA unnecessarily disables encryption and PDF scripting. (#8404)
  • Various fixes for complex layouts
  • Some fixes for rare exceptions

For a full list of changes and fixes see the changelog.

Important release notes und upgrading information can be found in the readme.

The PDFreactor 11 installation packages are available for download in the download area.

The use of RealObjects PDFreactor® to create management reports, from a self-developed reporting application to Integrated Data Warehouse (in German: Integrieter Datenhaushalt – IDH) for the Sparkasse Financial Group

The reporting application ‘IDH-Reporting’ for integrated data warehousing (IDH) provides the savings banks and state banks in Germany with a comprehensive software solution in the form of an individual development for the creation of reports and analyses from its IDH databases. Self- development means that IDH-Reporting is designed precisely for the specific needs of the savings banks and state banks, providing a wide functional range and great flexibility and avoiding the overheads of standard market tools with the irrelevant functions they include.

In the age of digitalization and the paperless office there remains the regulatory obligation to permanently archive certain results in order to track decisions and to visualize and in some cases also print content for the management and for committees. This not only requires the creation of reports in PDF format but also the possibility of exporting and importing report contents to and from PowerPoint using the Finanz Informatik committee reporting plugin. The documents that are created must be of high quality and optically attractive in order to satisfy the exacting standards of the management and the committees.

A further challenge is the permanent archiving of IDH retrievals and annotated analysis results. Persisted PDF documentation is required here also in order to fulfil the regulatory requirements in relation to assurance and traceability. These are generally results in table form that can often be large.

Various possible solutions were investigated for the creation of PDF documents in order to satisfy the tasks in the above challenge. Taking into account the regulatory requirements in relation to archiving in PDF/A format RealObjects PDFreactor® proved to be the most suitable tool. PDFreactor® distinguished itself with 1:1 reproduction of the browser UI in the PDF, even with more complex HTML content. Server-side printing without dedicated UI software such as a headless browser means that PDFreactor® is excellent for use in server landscapes that are highly optimized with high level protective measures.

Please also read the related case study.

About Finanz Informatik

Finanz Informatik, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, is the central IT service provider of Sparkasse Finance Group. Its customers include 376 Sparkasse savings banks, six state banks, DekaBank, eight state Landesbausparkasse state building societies, public sector insurers and further companies within the Sparkasse Finance Group and the financial sector. Finanz Informatik offers a complete IT service – from application development through infrastructure and data center operations to consultancy, training and support.

About RealObjects

RealObjects (www.realobjects.com), founded in 2000, provides W3C standard-compliant, cross platform software tools for electronic publishing, content authoring and web-to-print.

Its W3C standards-based publishing solution PDFreactor is an industry-recognized flagship product, which is used for server-side conversion of HTML to PDF whenever electronic and typeset-quality print output of business content is required. It is the perfect printing component for web applications, incl. database publishing, web-to-print, PIM, DMS, MDM, DAM, WCMS, VDP etc.

RealObjects tools have been used by about 3000 corporate customers in over 40 countries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, educational institutions as well as government and non-profit organizations. Several major accounts have deeply integrated RealObjects technology into their toolsets and solutions. A network of strategic business alliances, resellers and OEM partners/customers has been established over the years.

Contact:

Michael Jung
RealObjects, Managing Director
michael.jung@realobjects.com
Tel. +49 681 985 790