News Release

December 8, 2008 News Release in Japanese

Support for both CSS and XSL-FO with
Antenna House Formatter V5.0
Scheduled Release - February, 2009

Tokyo, Japan - December 8th, 2008 - Antenna House Inc., with corporate headquarters in Tokyo, is very pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Beta Version of Antenna House Formatter V5.0 with the newly added support for formatting HTML and XML into print and PDF using CSS3.

Now with Antenna House Formatter V5.0 page layouts can be specified using either CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 under development by the W3C) or XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language - Formatting Objects) for formatting documents for PDF, print and paged media.

Benefits of AH Formatter V5.0

With V5.0 you can now be formatting HTML for PDF and print within minutes of installing the software. Building on the wide use of CSS and the strengths of the CSS3 specification Antenna House Formatter V5.0 has added the capability that now enables web designers to use CSS to add high quality print and PDF output to their systems by using all the features and functionality that Antenna House has developed during the past 8 years as the supplier of the most powerful XSL-FO formatting software available.

Antenna House XSL Formatter, based on the W3C Recommendation for XSL-FO, has long been recognized as the most powerful and proven standards based formatting software available and is used worldwide in demanding applications where the need is to format XML into documents. Now that same power and functionality is available for formatting HTML and XML with CSS3.

Key Features of AH Formatter

In addition to the powerful formatting functions by using XSL-FO available with the V4.3, Antenna House V5.0 has added the ability for formatting HTML and XML with CSS.

• Output documents and forms written in XML or HTML to PDF, print or paged media according to a specified layout.
• Capable of using either CSS3 or XSL-FO for the layout specification . (Both CSS3 and XSL-FO cannot be mixed in the layout specification of one document.)
• Built-in default CSS stylesheet for producing high quality formatting from HTML without the need to create a separate stylesheet.
• Embed a variety of vector images such as MathML, SVG, CGM/WebCGM, EMF/WMF, EPS and PDF.
• Embed a variety of raster images such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, TIFF and PNG.
• Unicode based.
• Built-in hyphenation support for 40+ languages for Western countries and Thai.
• Capable of quality Chinese, Japanese and Korean formatting.
• Support for right to left languages like Arabic or Hebrew.
• Support for bi-directional (bidi) text with the mixture of right to left and left to right on the same line and in the same paragraph.
• Support for complex character sets like Devanagari or Thai.
• A graphical user interface as part of the Windows version for displaying and checking the formatted results.

Why Two Stylesheet Languages?

The fact that there are two stylesheet languages, both developed by W3C, has caused some confusion. The answer can be found in the table, graphic and explanation below:

	CSS		XSL
Can be used with HTML?	yes		no
Can be used with XHTML?	yes		yes
Can be used with XML?	yes		yes
Transformation Language (XSLT)	no		yes
Syntax	CSS		XSL-FO

The unique features are that CSS can be used to style HTML & XML documents. XSL, on the other hand, is able to transform documents. With XSL-FO XSL can be used to format documents for print and PDF. XSL can also be used to transform XML data into HTML/CSS documents on the Web server. This way, the two languages complement each other and can be used together.

This illustration from the W3C shows the relationship between CSS, XSL and the final presentation. XML documents can be rendered in three different ways: (1) if the document doesn't have to be transformed, use CSS. Otherwise, use XSLT, the transformation language of XSL, in one of two ways: either (2) generate the style properties together with the rearranged text, using a sub-language of XSL called XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects); or (3) generate a new XML or HTML document and provide a CSS style sheet for that new document.

Use CSS for styling web content or where information doesn't have to be transformed. Use XSL-FO for styling content from XML based content management systems, with content such as DITA, DocBook and S1000D, and where transformation is needed.

V5 Supported Platform

• Windows Version (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server2003, Windows Server2008)
• Windows x64 version (Windows XP x64 Edition, Windows Vista x64 Edition, Windows Server2003 x64 Edition, Windows Server2008 x64 Edition)
• Solaris version (Sun Solaris 10 (sparc version), Sun Solaris 10 (x86 version))
• Linux version
• Linux 64bit version
• Macintosh version Mac OS X Version 10.5 (intel version)
• HP-UX version (HP-UX11i v1 (B.11.11) PA-RISC version, HP-UX11i v2 (B.11.23) IA-64 version)
• AIX version (AIX Version 5.2, POWER version)

Upgrading from V4.3 to V5.0

Customers who are within their 90 day warranty period or who have a current Annual Maintenance Agreement can upgrade to V5.0 AH XSL or CSS Formatter at no charge, upgrade to V5.0 AH Formatter with the difference in price. For customers whose maintenance agreement has expired or who are no longer within their warranty period Antenna House offers the upgrade for either 50% of the purchase price of the software or allows the customer to purchase the Annual Maintenance Agreement retroactive to when their previous Agreement or Warranty ended.

Contact

For more information about features, availability and pricing please contact:

International Sales,
Antenna House, Inc. (USA)
3844 Kennett Pike
Suite 200
Greenville, Delaware 19807 USA
Telephone: +1 302-427-2456
mail:info@antennahouse.com

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