New PDF Rendering Engine

Aspose.Slides Product Family
1

Hi,

I was just wondering whether you could tell me what is different with the new PDF rendering engine?

a) Is it better quality?

b) Is it faster?

c) Does it support more of the PPT objects?

d) If it's completely new, might it have more bugs than the previous version?

Thanks,

Chris

2

Hello Chris,

1. That is first version and currently it has some issues but even now it has much better quality than old engine. Also there is no double conversion to intermediate format and losses of quality are minimal.
2. It is 2-5 times faster. Mostly because of good design, reducing size of code and making engine simple as possible. Size of Aspose.Slides.dll also reduced by 1Mb.
3. Size of generated PDF file much smaller especially for presentations without huge images inside. Sometimes it can be several times smaller than source PPT.
4. Yes, it has large improvements in rendering of PPT shapes, fill and line styles. PDF files are very close to our image renderer now.
5. Text in PDF rendered as text now so created PDF files can be indexed. It was rendered as polylines and curves before.

Known issues are:
1. Sometimes there are problems with rendering metafiles.
2. Line caps like arrows are not rendered.
3. No hyperlinks in a PDF yet.

3

Hi,

I tried to convert a PPT that worked like a charm with the old rendering engine. With the new engine some graphics look ugly (with artefacts and missing colors) and Adobe Reader 9 tells me “Cannot extract the embedded font ‘FAAACA+Verdana-Bold’. Some characters may not display or print correctly.” (and all umlauts are not visible).

I’m just wondering if there are more known issues/errors. If necessary I’ll try to generate a test-document (I cannot provide you with my document).

BR, Martin

4

Hello Martin,

I think AReader 9 error can happen because such font was not found and Renderer failed to embed it to the pdf.
Probably we will have to disable font embedding.

For wrong graphics rendering any example would be helpful.

Thank you.

5

Hi,

are there any news on this topic?

BR, Martin

6

Hello Martin,

It’s partially fixed but several problems still exist.

7

Hi Alexey,

thanks for your response. Do you have a rough time estimation for the fixes? I’ll have to skip the update for the PPT component otherwise.

BR, Martin

8

I hope it will be available on this week.

9

Hi,

any updates? Thank you for your information.

BR,

Martin

10

We are preparing release. It will be available for download in a few hours.

11

I noticed something about PDF generation? If I set a from and to transparency on a fill it is rendered as opaque.

Is this something that will be improved?

Thanks,
JP

12

Hello,

It will be implemented but later after fixing all current rendering problems.
I have added it to our to-do list.

13

Hi Alexey,

any updates?

Besides that we found a PPT that consists of many graphics and its size is ~2.2 MB. When we try to convert this document we constantly get an OutOfMemoryException using “SaveToPdf”. I cannot send you this specific presentation as it is a customer’s one. Here is the call stack:

at cz.q()
at j9.a(cz A_0)
at a8.a(cz A_0, PointF A_1, SizeF A_2)
at ls.a(ji A_0)
at j9.a(bx A_0, ji A_1)
at j9.b(ji A_0)
at k.a(ji A_0)
at jn.a(ji A_0)
at o1.d()
at gu.a()
at Aspose.Slides.Presentation.SaveToPdf(Stream stream, Int32[] slides)

Are there any known problem with large files?

BR, Martin

14

Hello Martin,

Please check attached new 2.9.3 hot fix.
- fixed problem with fonts.
- reduced memory use on rendering large emf/wmf metafiles.

15

Additional fix to reduce memory use on rendering large images.

16

Hi,

do you plan to increase the picture quality of the PPT->PDF conversion, because the converted pictures have a bad quality. I’ll send you some examples that are converted by Aspose and by Adobe Distiller (default settings) for comparison.

Br, Martin

17

Please try the Aspose.Slides
for .NET 2.9.4.2968

18

Hi,

this version does not help increasing the image quality. Any other suggestions? Right now one of our customers - who wants to use the conversion heavily - is very unhappy right now as this functionality is unusable for him.

Br,

Martin

19

Dear Martin,

The development team is already working on it and you will get this feature by the end of this week or next week.

20

Dear Martin,

We have published a new version with improved images quality. We are still working on it and going to improve it little more.

Please see this post.

Aspose.Slides version is also attached at that post. Here is a direct link for downloading it.