Introduction to Arbortext Layout Developer 12.0.0.0
Overview
Welcome to the new release of PTC Arbortext Layout Developer. This 12.0.0.0 release has a significant number of new features and functionality to enable users to make the most of their output. These will be described in their own sections and a brief overview provided below.
One of the main things you’ll probably notice is the name change. PTC Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher has been renamed to PTC Arbortext Layout Developer in order to better represent the nature of the product and its role within the Arbortext product suite. The Advanced Print Publisher name has caused some confusion in the past when compared to Arbortext Publishing Engine and, in order to eliminate this confusion, a more suitable name has been assigned. Layout Developer describes how the majority of users use the Desktop product — to create and develop layouts for page-based output.
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The application executable will now be ALD.exe rather than APP.exe
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Secondly, the numbering pattern has been changed to bring Arbortext products inline with other PTC products. As we’ve made changes to the UI and some core text formatting functionality, making the step to a full release makes sense. The numbering sequence for now will consist of four parts. The first part is the main version number. The second part is the ‘point’ number and will be incremented on a yearly basis as we add new features to the product until the next main version. The third and fourth numbers will represent maintenance releases and patches, respectively.
New Features
This release provides a set of new features and functions which have been asked for consistently over recent years, alongside others which will improve the Layout Developer’s usability and the development experience. Briefly, the new features are:
• Updates to the interface — We have made three major changes to the interface for this release. Firstly, the toolbars have been updated with new icons and a new structure. These help give Layout Developer a more modern look and feel, but also provide icons for most commonly used tasks. Secondly the menus have been rearranged to provide a better grouping more inline with the structure of functionality in the software. Thirdly we have enhanced the left (blue) bar to make it customisable and interactive. Application and document preference dialogs have also been updated.
• Support for OpenType feature tables — One of the most common requests over the last 10 years has been to support OpenType feature tables. This has been a real challenge to us but we are now happy to announce that Layout Developer can now support OpenType feature tables to provide enhanced word and character shaping.
• Support for the MathJax library — Another popular request has been to improve mathematics support, particularly MathML. The MathJax web library provides great support for MathML and we now provide a way to use this library in Layout Developer to generate SVG images from TeX and MathML input.
• Debugger enhancements — We continue to enhance the debugger to make it a more powerful development environment. In this release we provide interfaces in the dubugger for three features which historically have had no interface: Stored Objects, Page Sequence Control Streams and Context Control Streams. These interfaces allow template developers to build and manage these core parts of a template in a simple interface.
• Additions to JavaScript support and the Formatting Object Model — As part of our continued development, we have made some updates to JavaScript support. In support of MathJax, we have brought add-on libraries more up to date by making them JavaScript friendly. We have also provided a way to use the ‘no strict’ way of working in JavaScript and also provided a JavaScript start-up file which can be used to run JavaScript code in Layout Developer when it starts.
• Template events — We have added a number of events to the fTemplate object which will allow code to be executed when major events happen such as opening, printing and changing pages. These events can be used to perform tasks which can be used by other features released in this version of Layout Developer.
