Hello everyone,

We are incredibly proud to announce the immediate availability of version 24.1 of its industry-leading XML suite of products: Oxygen XML Editor, Author, Developer, Web Author, Publishing Engine, WebHelp, PDF Chemistry, and Oxygen XML Scripting!

This release includes productivity improvements for DITA authors and publishers, such examples being the possibility to rename referenced non-DITA resources directly in the DITA Maps Manager and performance enhancement when opening DITA maps with all of the referenced content expanded. On the DITA publishing side, the bundled DITA Open Toolkit was updated to the latest version and various updates, improvements, and new customization possibilities were implemented for DITA to WebHelp and CSS-based PDF output.

The innovative JSON Schema Design mode received a lot of improvements with a new Palette view that makes it very easy to build JSON schemas and content completion is now available for in-place editing within the diagram. Some of the existing JSON tools were also enhanced.

Add-ons were a major focus of this release, with many of the most popular ones receiving lots of updates, including the Git Client, Batch Documents Converter, OpenAPI Documentation Generator, OpenAPI Tester, and more, while an interesting new Smart Autocomplete add-on is also available to help writers create content by providing text completions.

With a focus on authoring experience and collaboration, the Oxygen XML Web Author now features a new Search side-view that makes it easier to find and replace content, support for @ mentions, and various security and component updates were also implemented.

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Oxygen XML Editor version 24.1 is an incremental release for the industry's most advanced bundle of tools used by technical writers, developers, collaborators, and publishers everywhere. The focus of this release was to expand upon the new features and improvements that were added in version 24.0.

An example of a productivity enhancement for DITA authors is that you can now rename referenced non-DITA resources directly in the DITA Maps Manager and performance was improved when opening DITA maps with all of the referenced content expanded. Meanwhile, on the DITA publishing side, the bundled DITA Open Toolkit was updated to the latest version and new transformation parameters make it possible to display media objects with an external link and to have glossary entries sorted and grouped.

The innovative JSON Schema Design mode that was recently introduced in the previous version received a lot of further enhancements. You can now move and re-order components within the diagram, a new Palette view makes it very easy to build JSON schemas by offering quick access to components that can be dragged and dropped into the diagram, new items were added to the contextual menu for easier access to various actions, and content completion is now available for in-place editing within the diagram.

Some of the existing JSON tools were also enhanced. You can now mark properties to be required when using the JSON Schema Generator tool, the XML to JSON converter tool now offers the possibility of controlling how empty elements are converted, and the JSON Schema Documentation generator tool now presents diagrams in the generated documentation for components from referenced files and you can choose to include hyperlinks that navigate to the particular component.

Add-ons were a major focus of this release, with many of the most popular ones receiving lots of updates.

The Git Client add-on continued to be enhanced with the addition of a revision graph within the History view, various actions were added while the toolbar was simplified to display the most common actions, performance was optimized, and some components were updated.

The Batch Documents Converter add-on now includes the possibility of converting content from Atlassian Confluence to DITA, and the DocBook to DITA conversion offers an option to convert all sections into individual DITA topics that are referenced in a new DITA map. It also now provides options for configuring the mappings between elements for certain types of conversions and tables are now handled better when converting Markdown to DITA.

For OpenAPI developers, a new OpenAPI Documentation generator tool is available to easily generate full documentation for OpenAPI components in HTML format and a new OpenAPI Tester is available to inspect OpenAPI request responses and to ensure they work as expected.

This release also marks the introduction of an interesting new Smart Autocomplete add-on that helps writers create content by providing text completions. It contributes a side-view where you can choose between a Built-in or OpenAI engine for generating the proposals for text completion. The Built-in engine analyzes all XML, HTML, or Markdown files in a project and then offers completion proposals when editing text content, while the OpenAI engine uses language models provided by the OpenAI company. Not only does that engine offer text completion proposals, but it also contributes various configurable actions that can be used to transform the selected text in the editor, and it allows you to create your own fine-tuned language models. Some examples of the actions that are available to transform the selected text include grammar corrections, paraphrasing, translating content into other languages, adding markup, creating ordered lists, and many more.

XSLT and XQuery transformations and debugging features were enhanced as the built-in version of Saxon was updated to version 10.6, which is considered to be the most stable and reliable version of Saxon. Also, a new option was added in the Compile XSL Stylesheet for Saxon dialog box that allows you to set the default namespace for unprefixed element names.

Other improvements include the complete removal of the Apache Log4j library to prevent security vulnerabilities associated with it, a new setting to control the initial display mode for tracked changes in the Author visual editing mode, more Markdown rules were added, and as usual, this release includes various important component updates and bug fixes.

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

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Oxygen XML Scripting provides a variety of functions that can be scheduled or triggered using a command-line tool on Windows, Linux, or macOS. The main focus for version 24.1 was various additions and improvements for the Batch Converter script.

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

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Oxygen Publishing Engine version 24.1 encompasses all of the improvements and new customization possibilities implemented in Oxygen XML WebHelp and Oxygen PDF Chemistry.

For Oxygen XML WebHelp publishers, this release added some Ant extension points to allow custom tasks to be executed before and after various transformation steps, the context-sensitive help system was optimized, and new transformation parameters were added to help you customize your WebHelp output.

Some examples of the improvements and updates that were added to Oxygen PDF Chemistry include the processor now offering support for absolute positioning for inline elements and the dependency on the Log4j library was removed to help prevent possible security vulnerability issues.

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

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Version 24.1.0 of Oxygen XML Web Author is the latest release for the innovative web-based XML authoring tool. This release expands upon the features that were recently added in Version 24.0.0 with further improvements to some of those features, along with several new enhancements. A new Search side-view makes it easier to find and replace content, @ mentions are now supported, performance was optimized, new functionality improves customizations and integrations, and various bugs were fixed, security was enhanced, and some components were updated.

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

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We hope you will enjoy our latest release of the Oxygen XML suite of products!
As always, feedback is welcome!

Best regards,
Alin

-- 
Alin Belu
Oxygen XML Editor