Hello everyone,

Today, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of version 24 of the industry-leading XML suite of products, Oxygen XML Editor, Author, Developer, Web Author, Publishing Engine, WebHelp, PDF Chemistry, and Oxygen XML Scripting.

This new release brings enhancements to the validation support with the DITA validate and check for completeness action being available as a validation unit that can be added to validation scenarios, dynamic publishing for DITA by converting various types of non-DITA resources to DITA, including MS Word, MS Excel, HTML, and Markdown, furthermore, the Enterprise Edition users may now upload and publish DITA to the Zendesk Help Center. The DITA to WebHelp transformation features improved navigation and the PDF Chemistry engine allows controlling the generated PDF security permissions and metadata.

The JSON support is improved constantly to match the support Oxygen offers for XML and version 24 brings a visual diagram editor for JSON helpful for increasing productivity when working with simple JSON Schemas and for visualizing, understanding, and editing complex JSON Schemas.

With a focus on authoring experience and collaboration, the Oxygen XML Web Author now boasts a re-designed interface, a new visual merge tool that enables you to easily resolve conflicts, and the ever popular Concurrent Editing feature has progressed through the BETA testing stages and now comes bundled with Web Author.

More functionality is exposed as part of Oxygen Scripting to enable automation/continuous integration and delivery workflows, including generating diff reports, as well as formatting and indenting XML documents.

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Version 24 of Oxygen XML Editor, the XML community's most advanced bundle of tools, introduces lots of exciting new features, updates, productivity enhancements, new customization options, and various performance optimizations.

As the Oxygen team perpetually strives to make the DITA authoring experience more and more efficient and dynamic, DITA users can now configure and run validation scenarios directly from the DITA Maps Manager, or configure validation scenarios that process validation and completeness checks for DITA maps or DITA Open Toolkit projects. With the introduction of new refactoring actions for DITA, it is easier than ever to convert between DITA bookmaps and normal maps, to change or remove profiling attribute values, and to convert direct links to indirect key-based references. To help you get started with your own customizations, a new sample DITA project is available with examples for various framework customizations and best-practices techniques. We also continued to update Oxygen to support the latest DITA 2.0 standard.

On the DITA publishing side, a new transformation scenario (available in the Oxygen Enterprise edition) can be used to upload and publish content to the Zendesk Help Center. Also, it is now possible to dynamically convert various types of non-DITA resources (MS Word, MS Excel, HTML, and Markdown) to DITA during the publishing process. For PDF publishing, the output can be generated in compliance with the PDF/Universal Accessibility standard, copyright information is now automatically processed, and you can restrict the permissions for people using your PDF files, for instance to prevent printing or copying of the PDF content, or even to control the access to the PDF document by requiring a password.

Oxygen's expanding JSON community will be pleased to learn that a visual diagram editor was integrated in a new specialized editor for JSON Schema documents. It offers validation support, content completion, an outline view, and JSON-specific syntax highlighting. The JSON Schema editor's new intuitive, expressive visual schema design mode provides a simple diagram editor that is helpful for visualizing and understanding both simple and complex JSON Schemas. It also offers various editing features to help you modify JSON Schemas directly within the visual design mode.

Some of the general editing productivity improvements include a new Block Tags without Element Names display mode that shows block element tags in a more compact look, the ability to save remote images locally while choosing to update any existing references, and a new XML refactoring operation that can be used to batch accept tracked changes or remove comments and highlights.

When using the Compare Files or Compare Directories command-line scripts (or the similar comparison tools within Oxygen), you now have the ability to save the results of a comparison as an HTML report file that can be viewed in your browser or other application. A new tool was also added in Oxygen for generating an HTML report that contains the results of a directory comparison (for either 2-way or 3-way comparisons).
Add-ons continue to gain popularity and this latest release gives you the possibility to extend Oxygen's functionality even further by introducing numerous updates and improvements to the Git Client, DITA Prolog Updater, and Batch Converter add-ons. A new entry to the Oxygen add-ons library comes in the form of the Writer Helper. It is designed to help technical writers by offering them tips, finding possible similar content that could be reused, and even has an option for reading content out loud using the operating system's narrator.

Some of the other exciting highlights for this version include startup speed performance improvements, some new ways to use editor variables, various API additions, bug fixes, component updates, and much more.

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

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Oxygen XML Scripting version 24 offers updates and improvements for some of the scripts that are available to provide a variety of functions that can be scheduled or triggered using a command-line tool on Windows, Linux, or macOS. This release brings the possibility of generating various types of comparison reports, a new merge option, several improvements for the file and directory comparison scripts, a brand new script that can be used to batch format and indent multiple files at once, as well as other updates and bug fixes.

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

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Oxygen Publishing Engine version 24 encompasses all of the improvements and new customization possibilities implemented in Oxygen XML WebHelp and Oxygen PDF Chemistry.

As an Oxygen XML WebHelp publisher, now you have access to new transformation parameters to help style the WebHelp output to suit your specific needs, new expand/collapse buttons for choosing whether or not to display both the topic and publication table of contents, and various other small updates and bug fixes.

Some examples of the improvements and updates that were added to Oxygen PDF Chemistry include the possibility of controlling the security policies for the Chemistry processing, protecting your PDF files using security permissions, for instance to prevent printing or copying of the PDF content, or even to control the access to the PDF document by requiring a password. Some new properties can also be used to control various components in the PDF output (such as the initial settings for how the document is presented, copyright information, or custom metadata).

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

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Version 24.0.0 of Oxygen XML Web Author is the latest release for the innovative web-based XML authoring tool. This release introduces a visual merge tool for resolving conflicts when committing to a shared Git repository, a re-design of the interface to offer a more modern and visually appealing look and better blending when Web Author is embedded in another application (such as a CMS), additional protection against XXE vulnerabilities and other security-related improvements, as well as more customization possibilities, performance optimizations, and accessibility enhancements.

Also, the ever popular Concurrent Editing feature has progressed through the BETA testing stages and is now bundled with the Oxygen XML Web Author installers.

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

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We hope you will enjoy the latest release of the Oxygen XML suite of products!
As always, your feedback on it is welcomed.

Best regards,
Alin

-- 
Alin Belu
Oxygen XML Editor