College Park, MD; March 20th, 2003 - Advent Publishing Systems today announced that it will release a new and substantially enhanced version of its 3B2 software, Version 8, at XML Europe on May 5th 2003. Advent's 3B2 software automates and solves the world's most demanding and complex, print and online publishing challenges in government and blue chip corporations worldwide, "This latest version of 3B2 software demonstrates our commitment to staying at the leading edge of technology and international standards. It's a uniquely capable product that can be configured in a variety of ways to provide genuine process automation. In addition, it delivers an enhanced experience to our customers in terms of increased efficiency and productivity," comments George Punton, CEO of Advent Publishing Systems. "Version 8 represents a milestone in terms of performance, flexibility, productivity, and fast return on investment for the composition and pagination of long, complex and difficult-to-produce documents," Punton concludes. Key new features in Advent 3B2 Well rounded standards implementation Version 8 of 3B2 implements a range of important XML-related international standards. Implementing these standards ensures it is cost-effective and efficient to integrate 3B2 into a wide variety of customized publishing system configurations. They also help our customers reduce development costs and ensure faster time to market. *The LibXML suite is open source software integrated into 3B2 that ensures XML conformance and saves time by validating syntax and reporting errors quickly and efficiently. *XSL-FO combines the professional typography 3B2 has to offer with the accessibility of XSL-FO. *XPath simplifies the development of content queries thereby reducing development time. *XSLT delivers increased flexibility by enabling XML-tagged data to be re-used for multiple outputs such as pdf, html, etc. and to simplify development by allowing data-restructuring according to output requirements *Support for the emerging standard SVG allows graphics to be created from data dynamically reducing the time and expertise required to handle graphics in XML documents. Additional new features in Version 8 of Advent 3B2 software include: *Page building on the fly wherein content can determine page layout *More consistent 3B2 programming commands that make 3B2 easier to use and more intuitive *A new de-bugging tool that streamlines the development and debugging of templates and formats and eliminates time-consuming errors *A new format profiler for producing job statistics on the processing speed of a job to help identify and resolve inefficient coding *Font quick tables to make fonts more accessible *New and improved CALS libraries for reduced programming/set-up time for use with SGML and XML. *Entities Libraries to support ISO standard entity sets *Improved and enhanced user interface