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Syncro Soft Announces the Release of Version 22 for the Oxygen XML Suite of Products

Press release from the issuing company

Syncro Soft announces the release of Version 22 for the Oxygen XML suite of products, boasting the most impressive set of new features and improvements to date. Two new products are also introduced, Oxygen Feedback and Oxygen Publishing Engine.

Syncro Soft, the developer of the Oxygen XML suite of products, is proud to announce the immediate availability of version 22 of its industry-leading XML editing suite of products, Oxygen XML Editor, Author, Developer, Web Author, WebHelp, PDF Chemistry, and version 2.0 of Oxygen Content Fusion. Simultaneously, Oxygen Feedback, a new comments management platform, has progressed through the Beta phase and it is now available for commercial use, while the new Oxygen Publishing Engine offers automation support for transforming DITA content into WebHelp, PDF, EPUB, and plain HTML output from your integration scripts.

This release offers an incredibly robust set of new features and improvements and the seamless synthesis of all the products makes Oxygen the most comprehensive solution available for XML authoring, development, publishing, and collaboration. The latest additions and enhancements focus on productivity, performance, security, cost-efficiency, and simplicity.

New features and improvements added in Oxygen XML Editor/Author/Developer version 22.0 include:

* DITA authoring enhancements include a new DITA Perspective that provides an optimal UI environment for working with DITA projects, media resources are now presented in the DITA Reusable Components View, various improvements to search and refactoring operations, and much more.

* Support was added for the DITA-OT project file, used to define all the contexts and deliverables for a DITA publication project. Some of its benefits include simplified publishing using a single configuration file, the possibility to share and reuse project configurations, project-level validation support, and enhanced authoring.

* DITA publishing to PDF using CSS was updated with various new parameters and styling features, and it is now possible to transform a single DITA topic to CSS-based PDF output.

* The HTML5 editing support was enhanced to be as robust as with XHTML. You can now edit HTML documents in the Author visual mode even if they are not XML well-formed. Support was also added for content completion in CSS or JS code embedded in HTML, code templates, formatting, XPath queries, and much more.

* The built-in Markdown editor is more powerful than ever. You can now apply business rule checks using real-time Schematron validation, and the editor now has synchronized scrolling between the source pane and preview pane, which offers the possibility of previewing the Markdown content as HTML, DITA, or Lightweight DITA, with the latter two facilitating the use of Markdown in the DITA ecosystem.

* State-of-the-art JSON tools were added for converting XSD to JSON Schema and generating JSON Schema from sample JSON files. Further improvements refined the content completion assistant, validation, and syntax highlighting features for JSON documents.

* The user interface is now also available in the Chinese language.

* As always, this release includes numerous other requested features, API additions, bug fixes, and component updates.

New features added in Oxygen XML Web Author version 22.0.0 include:

* Structured auto-correct, to automatically expand text patterns to corresponding XML markup. For example, prefixing some text with "*" or "-" in DITA will generate a list item.

* Easier and more efficient way to insert content references or cross references directly from the target document preview.

* DITA users will benefit from improvements to the behavior of certain keyboard shortcuts, a new CSS style, and a new action for defining DITA variables.

* Toolbar actions were added to the Markdown editor to make it easier to insert syntax and real-time validation of Markdown documents against a custom Schematron file is now possible.

* It is now easier to reuse content in DocBook documents with new toolbar actions for XInclude and inserting links.

* The user interface is available also in the Chinese language.

* Various new APIs, performance and stability improvements, and more.

New features added in Oxygen Content Fusion version 2.0 include:

* Subject Matter Experts can now create new Content Fusion tasks directly in the browser interface and then share them with the documentation team to be integrated into their projects.

* A DITAVAL file can now be attached to a task so that content is filtered based upon its defined conditional profiling attribute values.

* Resources (such as images or CSS files) referenced in XML files are detected and optionally can be automatically included in new Content Fusion tasks.

* The built-in visual editor (Oxygen XML Web Author) was updated to its latest version.

* Various security improvements and interface enhancements were added.

Improvements and updates added for Oxygen PDF Chemistry version 22.0 include:

* The overall performance of the Chemistry processor was improved up to 20%.

* It is now possible to display change bars to mark some revised elements in the content.

* Hyphenated words are now searchable, and can be copied from a PDF reader and pasted in their original form, without the hyphen.

* Fallback fonts were added for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.

* Support was added for various CSS properties, functions, fonts, and more.

As mentioned, version 22 also marks the initial release of a new product called Oxygen Feedback. It provides a way for your community to interact and offer feedback by embedding a stylish comments area into any HTML-based website. It is particularly designed for published WebHelp Responsive output and an add-on is available that contributes a side view where you can see all the comments from your output directly in Oxygen XML Editor/Author, matched to the corresponding DITA topics. Users with an already existing valid license for Oxygen XML Editor/Author can request a free one-year license at https://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen_feedback/special_offer.html

The goal of the Oxygen Publishing Engine is to make deployments outside of Oxygen XML Editor/Author more efficient. For example, you can automate publishing from a continuous integration server by offering the same configuration that you use when you publish from Oxygen XML Editor/Author. This initial version provides the DITA Open Toolkit with integrated Oxygen publishing plugins, including the responsive Oxygen WebHelp and the CSS-based PDF Chemistry engine as a cost-effective bundle. More details can be found at https://www.oxygenxml.com/publishing_engine.html

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