In June of 2007 Ecma TC46 took over development of the XPS specification from Microsoft. After two years of hard work and fixing over 200 issues the new Ecma standard for OpenXPS (Ecma-388) was approved yesterday. Like all Ecma standards it can be freely downloaded: get it HERE.

Also approved yesterday was a formal JFIF technical report. The JFIF specification defines a file format for a JPEG-compressed image, and was written quite a while ago by an informal group lead by Tom Lane, and has been referenced and implemented very widely, but it’s never had any official home; you just had to trawl the net to find a copy (probably ending up with one unofficially hosted by the W3C). TC46 worked with Tom, and liaised with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 (the home of JPEG) to bring out a technical report that is technically identical to the informal specification to enable other standards to reference it in a more robust way. JFIF is published as TR/98 and available HERE.

Congratulations to all of TC46 on a job well done.

There’s more information about TC46 HERE.

And more on XPS, both the format and Global Graphics’ technologies HERE.

Martin

After a hectic couple of week’s launching gDoc Fusion to the world, I want to highlight some of the great things being said about our new PDF tool as well as address some small issues people have highlighted.

Across the world journalists, reviewers and our peers have been talking about gDoc Fusion and its benefits. In the UK business and technology publications like VNUet.com and Computer Business Review to general consumer media like Computeractive have highlighted gDoc Fusions’ ease of use as a key benefit.

In the US and Australia, ComputerWorld.au ran our launch story as well as trade media Planet PDF emphasising how easy it is to share and convert PDF, XPS, Word and PowerPoint files using gDoc. Sites like Technolawyer have given gDoc favourable reviews.
And in Germany Computerzietung and Computerwoche covered the launch.

Equally bloggers and Twitterers have been discussing gDoc Fusion including Adrian Ford and Ivan Walsh as well as Martin Heller who’s been recommending it to his followers.

Most reviews have been fantastic covering of the many benefits gDoc Fusion offers in terms of easy of use and simple user interface. Of those reviewers of the pre-release version a couple of people have found some issues on particular hardware configurations but Martin Heller, for example later posted than any challenges he had were just on his Vista for x64 machine but “the product is completely solid on my 32-bit Windows XP machine” and concluded that gDoc Fusion “…does a better job than Acrobat at redacting sensitive text from PDF documents and editing PDF text in place. It also fills a major void in Acrobat’s functionality and converts PDF documents back to Word format.”

Overall, we’ve been extremely pleased with our launch reception and I wish to thank all those who took the time to review the product and offer feedback. Our development team is now pressing ahead with SP1 which we intend to launch mid June.
We’re determined to continue to improve the product and only add extra functionality that users actually need. I look forward to continued feedback from across the world.