Syncro Soft is proud to announce the immediate availability of version 26 of its industry-leading XML suite of products: Oxygen XML Editor, Author, Developer, Web Author, Publishing Engine, WebHelp, PDF Chemistry, and Scripting, as well as the launch of its newest product, Oxygen JSON Editor, an affordable subscription-based application designed specifically for editing JSON and JSON Schema documents.

This release introduces the exciting new Oxygen AI Positron Assistant, an add-on that provides a powerful tool to help writers increase their productivity by performing repetitive tasks, reviewing grammar, generating structure and text, or proposing changes to improve readability. It always keeps the writer in control, offering a visual diff comparison to help quickly understand what changed and the ability to continue the chat with the AI to refine the proposals.

There is new functionality available for DITA users, XSLT/XQuery developers, as well as for JSON/YAML developers.

It is now possible to generate comparison results as documents containing change tracking highlights to allow the changes to be rendered visually in the resulting documents, making it easy to review, accept, or reject them. This feature is also available via scripts to enable automation.

Some of our popular add-ons were updated such as Git Client, Batch Documents Converter, and OpenAPI Documentation Generator. As always, this release also provides various important component updates, such as DITA-OT and Saxon, bug fixes, and security enhancements.

Oxygen XML Web Author version 26 provides a preview of the AI Positron Assistant on the Web Author demo server, allowing users to experiment with a variety of AI-powered actions meant to improve their overall productivity. It will be available for Web Author on-premise installations very soon. Web Author also received component updates and improvements related to file comparisons, DITA editing, and security.

What's New in Oxygen XML Editor 26

One of the most anticipated and innovative additions in Oxygen 26 is the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant, an add-on that provides a powerful tool to help writers use AI-generated content to enhance their overall productivity while keeping them in full control of the changes made to the documents, allowing them to see exactly what is modified using the powerful visual XML-aware diff comparison tool provided by Oxygen.

Users benefit from a set of fine-tuned predefined actions that enable them to:
- Generate content such as DITA topics, document fragments, short descriptions, and index terms.
- Improve existing content in terms of grammar, readability, and the use of active voice.
- Get various insights to understand how readable the content is and how it responds to questions.
- Translate to various languages while preserving the XML structure.
- Write better marketing messages with support for generating press releases, marketing posts, or applying marketing frameworks.

Users can define their own custom AI actions or favorite prompts and easily share them with other project members.

Oxygen AI Positron Assistant offers intelligent support to help resolve document validation problems with an innovative variant of a quick-fix called AI-fix that asks the AI engine to find a solution for a validation problem and applies its suggestion.

For complex and repetitive tasks that the AI may not be able to accurately complete without assistance, it is possible to record a set of instructions for the AI to follow and the final result can be saved as a custom AI action or as a favorite prompt.

Furthermore, the AI functionality is made available via two XPath AI functions that enable the use of AI from any language that uses XPath expressions such as XSLT, XQuery, and Schematron. For example, it is possible to create XSLT-based XML refactoring actions that can batch process multiple documents, applying AI functionality on them, or to define Schematron Quick-Fixes that utilize the AI functions.

DITA authors can take advantage of a simplified process of extracting and organizing parts of a document into separate topics with the ability to extract a selection of content into a new DITA topic, better i18n support, and the use of the existing DITAVAL filter files to automatically apply colors and styles to render the content in the editor.

JSON developers can more easily navigate through large documents since the JSON diagram editor now has its own dedicated outline view. When changing a property in the JSON diagram editor, all the references to that property are now automatically updated, saving the user time and effort by eliminating the need to manually update the schema and preventing any inconsistencies or errors. Additionally, if no JSON schema is associated with a JSON document, Oxygen can now learn the document structure by parsing the document internally and using that as an inferred schema to provide content completion and validation.

YAML developers now have full support for creating, editing, and validating YAML documents. They have access to new actions, such as the go to the definition action that allows for easy navigation to the definition of the current property and another action to easily open the associated schema for the YAML document. When creating new YAML documents, the new document wizard now includes a Customize option that enables users to configure the generation of new YAML documents based on a specified JSON Schema, ensuring consistency and adherence to predefined rules.

For XSLT and XQuery users, the built-in Saxon processor used for transformations and debugging was updated to version 12.3. Oxygen's support has been enhanced to handle the latest extension functions supported by Saxon. The Extract Function refactoring action was improved to better handle XPath expressions. Additionally, two new AI-based extension functions (contributed by the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant add-on) that can be used to rephrase content and to perform validation checks on the existing content are available in the content completion for XSLT, XQuery, XPath, and Schematron.

The support to generate comparison results as documents containing change tracking highlights is available for both document and directory comparison tools, allowing the changes to be rendered visually in the resulting documents, making it easy to review, accept, or reject them, or enabling the users to publish them and highlight the modified content. These tools are also available as scripts for those who are interested in automating these processes, using the Oxygen XML Scripting license.

Some of the most popular add-ons were updated. The Git Client add-on now comes with integration of Large File Support (LFS), among many other new additions. The Batch Documents Converter add-on received various improvements when converting OpenAPI to DITA, Word to HTML/DITA, or Confluence to DITA, and the OpenAPI Documentation Generator add-on now has the option to transform the OpenAPI content into DITA output, along with several other enhancements.

Other improvements include enhanced coverage for HTTPS certificate validation in corporate environments by utilizing trusted root certificates from the Windows certificate store, improved syntax highlighting for Markdown documents containing LaTeX equations that allows for more efficient editing and seamless integration of mathematical expressions, and as usual, this release includes several important component updates, bug fixes, and security enhancements.

This short video highlights the most important additions to Oxygen XML Editor version 26: https://youtu.be/fWvqYpGtJmw 

For more information, see: https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/whats_new.html 

Introducing a New Product: Oxygen JSON Editor

JSON developers will be thrilled with the launch of the new Oxygen JSON Editor. This specialized product is designed for editing JSON and JSON Schema documents, as well as other JSON-related technologies. What sets the Oxygen JSON Editor apart is its affordable subscription-based pricing option. Now, developers can access powerful JSON editing capabilities at a reasonable cost, without compromising on quality.

For more information, see: https://www.oxygenxml.com/json_editor/whats_new.html 

What's New in Oxygen XML Web Author 26

One of the most exciting new features is the preview of the new Oxygen AI Positron Assistant plugin that provides a powerful tool to help writers use AI-generated content, available now on the Web Author demo server (https://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen-xml-web-author/app/oxygen.html) and soon to be available for Web Author on-premise installations. The plugin contributes a side pane that offers a variety of AI-powered actions with the goal of improving productivity. Actions are available to provide helpful hints for the next writing steps, enhance the readability of existing content, correct grammar errors, generate index terms, translate content, create marketing-related material, or even restructure parts of a document.

Interface improvements make it easier to insert special characters, users can now edit Mermaid diagrams in the editor, tracked changes are more visible when renaming elements, and static text labels are now translated properly for the Chinese language. The ability to merge changes when comparing two documents is now available to ensure a more accurate and efficient collaboration on documents and users can now trigger comparisons of specific document versions directly from the Version History dialog box.

The Concurrent Editing feature now works with a high availability deployment consisting of two servers to help mitigate the possibility of losing connections, while also providing a higher capacity, as it can accommodate more users.

DITA authors now have multiple convenient ways to edit profiling attributes within the editor or in the Attributes side-pane and it is now much easier to create and insert topic references when editing DITA maps.

This short video highlights the most important additions to Oxygen XML Web Author version 26: https://youtu.be/IQKzB3pJnXY 

For more information, see: https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_web_author/whats_new.html 

What's New in Oxygen Publishing Engine 26

Oxygen Publishing Engine version 26 encompasses the improvements and additions implemented in Oxygen XML WebHelp and Oxygen PDF Chemistry. This latest release offers some exciting new search features for WebHelp publishers, new customization possibilities for PDF publishers, and the bundled DITA-OT distribution was updated to version 4.1.1. Various other component updates and bug fixes were implemented as well.

Oxygen XML WebHelp version 26.0 introduces some exciting advanced search features that were implemented in conjunction with the upcoming 4.0 release of Oxygen Feedback. Once Oxygen Feedback 4.0 will be released, WebHelp publishers will have access to Semantic Search, which will enhance the accuracy of search results for the end user and they will be able to configure Faceted Search functionality in the WebHelp output, enabling users to refine their search results by applying multiple filters that correspond to different facets of the information they are seeking. The introduction of Labels in the WebHelp output will make it effortless to search for topics with the same label. Furthermore, the integration with the Oxygen Feedback Search Engine will support advanced query syntax, giving users the ability to create complex and flexible queries that generate precise search results.

Oxygen PDF Chemistry version 26 is the latest release for the CSS Paged Media processor used for obtaining PDF output from HTML or XML documents through CSS styling. This version brings the possibility of setting the width property on top or bottom page margin boxes to better customize documents when displaying page numbers, publication titles, or other artwork and XPath expressions can be used inside SVG templates to insert dynamic text when creating the PDF output.

For more information, see: https://www.oxygenxml.com/publishing_engine/whats_new.html 

DITA-OT Day 2024

On the 11th of February, 2024, Oxygen XML Editor organizes the 8th edition of the DITA-OT Day conference in Helsinki, Finland, a full day, in-person event dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit project, which is the reference DITA implementation and the core of almost all DITA-based publishing solutions (Oxygen included).

Find out more details and registration information at https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2024/dita-ot_day.html