Release Notes

• Added support for invoking an external editor in a generic way. Now any image editor can be integrated with PPP that supports the file formats and is able to open a file using command line options.
• Removed the PE toolbar and the associated DDE communications from the program.

• New option: JPEG compression quality can be set on a job-by-job basis.
  
• Proper creation of grayscale JPEG (previously it was 24bit). Now a grayscale JPG file that  is processed by PPP will be saved as an 8-bit grayscale file.
  
• PEToolbar.ini uses C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\ELAN\PPP. 
  

• Save/load functionality for release (conversion) settings has been added.
  
• Indexer fields are now visible by default.
• Main editor toolbars are now visible by default.
• Save/load functionality for barcode settings has been added.
• Added application support for limited Windows users. Vista compatibility.
  
• Barcode recognition bug fixed where some barcodes would return multiple barcode strings.
• Barcode settings now can be saved as default and transferred from job to job.
• Keylock protection bug fixed where HASP protected application wouldn't run.
• IMPORTANT: Scan problem fixed where in native transfer images were assigned wrong resolution
• Adjust image resolution feature added.
• Complete rebuild with updated libraries.
• File Browser updated to address network based job problems.
• Network based job access bug fixed.
• Page by Page PDF conversion fixed.
• XML export for metadata has been added.
• Software keylock registration file (reg.ini) was moved to the user directory - "c:\Documents and Settings\USER_NAME\Application Data\ELAN Capture\reg.ini".
• Fixed bug which created Access vialation error in certain cases while moving multiple tree items.
• Bates stamping bug fixed where in rare cases a text bitmap was not placed on an image.
• Replaced standard Borland memory manager with NexusDB.
• Replaced standard open file dialog for file insertion to overcome high number file selection limit.
• Fixed bug when application would crash on 0 lenght or non existing image files.
• Updated application registration form for better e-mail formating.

• Limited Windows user support has been added. All settings are now saved in user's profile directory.
• New job dialog now has Tiff and Jpeg files selected as default image extensions.
• TOC pattern setup and page number pattern setup are kept from the last job.
• TOC Builder Insert button now works on all selected lines.
• TOC Builder now allows to move multiple line selection.
• PDF conversion settings now are transfered from the last converted job.

• Bug fix in editor: losing selected area on save. Reproduce: 1. move selection 2. save 3. exit 4. reopen, selection is wiped out
• Discontinued support for factory?.* files
• Added support for restricted user operation. The application must still be installed using an administrative account, but the program will operate with login as a restricted user.
  

 ELAN Imaging and Assembly Module:

• Grayscale processing algorithm has been improved.
  
• Halftone descreen filter for grayscale images has been added.

ELAN Proofer Pro:

• Fixed scan line out of range bug which appeared when performing preview operation on blank images.
• Added rasterization option to enable/disable crop box.
• Use Crop Box rasterization option has been added.

ELAN Imaging and Assembly:

• Fixed file with LZW compression handling while passing them from EIA to Proofer
• Viewer refresh switching from image view to PDF view has been fixed
• Other small internal optimizations and small bug fixes
• Fixed image handling with LZW compression
• Batch processing for grayscale images added
• Batch deskew for B&W images info output to the hierarchy tree added
• Fixed bug where PDF files were disappearing after releasing a job
• Fixed browser PDF preview bug

ELAN Imaging and Assembly and ELAN Proofer Pro:

• Adobe Acrobat initialization time was increased to give enough time for initialization on slower computers
• Fixed raster image viewer bug showing "Scan Line Error" message
• PDF Viewer bug fixed where application when first time started was spawning external Acrobat window

• OCR engine has been changed to ScanSoft OCR. The recognition accuracy has been increased substantially providing immediate increase in productivity.
• OCR implementation was changed to plugin architecture.
• TOC parsing was improved.
• Manual link creation was changed.
• PDF metataging added through the implementation of the indexing module.
• Replaced scan engine to the most recent version with many enhancements (background technology improvements)
• Added support for configuring an external image editor
• Replaced the PDF conversion engine to the most recent ELAN GMK conversion libraries

This is a maintenance release addressing various improvements and bug fixes:

• Fixed bug which created Access violation error in certain cases while moving multiple tree items.
• Bates stamping bug fixed where in rare cases a text bitmap was not placed on an image.
• Replaced standard Borland memory manager with NexusDB.
• Replaced standard open file dialog for file insertion to overcome high number file selection limit.
• Fixed bug when application would crash on 0 length or non existing image files.
• Updated application registration form for better e-mail formating.

ELAN Convereter release:

• Updated internal libraries to the new ELAN PDF library. This library handles a wider range of files which serve as input to Converter (mainly PDF input) and also contains output enhancements.
  
• This is a maintenance release bringing it on pair with other ELAN GMK applications.

ELAN Imaging and Assembly:

• Batch processing for grayscale added. Now you can highlight  image areas on several different pages and process them in one batch operation.

General Issues:

• GhostScript rasterization moved from dll implementation to command line. Provides more stability .
• Embedded PDF viewer changed from ActiveX to Acrobat Plugin. The Acrobat integration is based not entirely an API calls.

GhostScript configuration:

• There is no more need for the GhostScript configuration utility. The GhostScript version can be selected now from both applications - Proofer and EIA through menu File|Settings.
• If there is no version selected, the highest available Ghost script version will be used.

Installation:

• PDF viewer version selection has been removed as there is no difference anymore between using Acrobat 6 or Acrobat 7.
• Firebird SQL server selection from installer has been removed. Now Firebird SQL server is always selected for installation. However it checks if Firebird is already installed.
• ELAN Acrobat Plugins are registered as shared dlls to prevent accidental removal while uninstalling other ELAN products.
  

ELAN Imaging and Assembly:

• Implemented quick image viewer to display large color and grayscale images. Large image files can be now browsed conveniently without (or little) lag in display. As an example, a 12"x18", 24 bit, 600 DPI JPG image will be displayed on the computer screen without a noticeable lag. You need to have a reasonably configured PC (XP, 3GHz, 500MB RAM) to achieve this result.
• Improved color/grayscale display speed during scanning, see above description.
• Improved PDF conversion quality and speed. The conversion library will create PDF files now without loading the images first in memory. This method also eliminates the need to uncompress and compress the images, thus keeping the same quality as the original image. This is important when handling images compressed with lossy algorithms like JPEG.
• Fixed rare bugs that caused Editor to crash.
• Fixed tree node movement when drag and drop got disabled after opening/creating next job.

ELAN Imaging and Assembly:

• Added PDF conversion/release options to select image compression. User can now set JPG quality when converting multi-layer PDF files created from scanned B&W, grayscale or color images.
• Installation now has embedded original Firebird SQL installation. This option adds support for cases when an existing FireBird SQL server is already installed on the same computer.
• Fixed the file browser preview window when last image was displayed if there was no selection.
• Fixed editor behavior on new job to display the current image instead of displaying the last image from the previous job.
• Fixed bug when batch image processing failed with read-only files. Now the rear-only attribute is removed if it is present. This condition surfaced when copying files from a CD/DVD-ROM using Windows Explorer.
• Fixed viewer bug when after deleting all pages the last image was displayed.
• Fixed crash when opening not valid TIFF file.

ELAN Proofer:

• PDF shifting changed to prevent negative media box shifting. This is a new positioning engine to make the generated PDF files more compliant. Some applications were unable to handle this standard PDF feature.

Release Module

• XDS printing tab is now changed to add support for Xerox’s FreeFlow print Manager.

Important notes:

• Previous versions lower than 2.5 MUST be uninstalled prior to installing version 2.5 and higher.
• Previous EIA jobs are NOT compatible with version 2.5. However ELAN Proofer jobs can be opened.
• Overall workflow UI has been further streamlined.
• Acrobat 7.0 improves the overall performace of the application. This is due to the fact that the integration routines of 7.0 have benn improved by Adobe. Starting up Acrobat 7.0 is also a lot faster if compared to 5.0 or 6.0. Customers concerned with speed should upgrade to 7.0. However, at the time of this writing PitStop does not support 7.0 -- you might have to wait for an upgrade from Enfocus if you do a lot of object editing.
  

ELAN Professional Proofer:

• Fully optimized release build.
• Registry key handling changed to control Proofer versions.
• Configuration Utility always stays on top.
• Firebird Database Engine updated to version 1.5.2 (SQL-based back-end for job handling).
• Book layout display now correctly displays first and last pages. Also, does not “remember” lasts job’s page at startup.
• Internal re-factoring, no changes in UI.
• Added Job Center button to the workflow to open EIA in Job Center mode.
• Acrobat 7 support added.

ELAN Imaging & Assembly:

• Added direct impositioning from EIA.
• ELAN Proofer Acrobat Plug-in has been updated.
• Added an option to open already processed job in the Proofer instead of always recreating it.
• Now the working directory can be customized.
• Internal job handling changed. Now every job has it's own working directory under c:\ELAN Jobs by default, but can be customized.
  
• Job Center Database structure has been changed.
• Job dialogs were changed slightly according to new job handling.
• Main application window now has "Job Center" caption if application is in job center mode.
• Acrobat 7 support added.
• Now B&W editor has a Tool Panel used for text creation, despeckle and line removal setting.
  
• Deskew has a warning dialog if skew angle is too big.

Bug fixes:

Imaging & Assembly:

•       New Job dialog has been changed to give user more file input options.
•       LPR printing now has warning messages if job integrity is broken and PDF file does not exist.

•       Progress dialogs are synchronized with threaded processes.
•       Image extraction for some problematic files has been fixed.

Proofer:

•       PDF merging module replaced with ELAN PDF merger.

•       Fast raster job importing from EIA when application was crashing processing Jpeg images.

•       Now error dialog is not showing up after impositioning PDF file when output document has   different number of pages than input.

Known issues:

•      Some batch processing dialogs do not stop a process if Stop/Cancel button is pushed.
•      Input module may have some logic problems because of the new complex job handling.

Future development:

•      Fast raster image extraction from PDF files.
•      More clear Input/Output file handling.
•      User friendly batch processing error loging.
•      EIA Job center layout to be changed to be more intuitive.