Hello everyone,

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of version 27 of its industry-leading XML suite of products: Oxygen XML Editor, Author, Developer, Web Author, Publishing Engine, WebHelp, PDF Chemistry, Scripting, and JSON Editor.

The newest release for Oxygen XML Editor highlights significant advancements in AI capabilities, particularly through the enhanced Oxygen AI Positron Assistant plugin, which now integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for more relevant and context-aware responses. New Intelligent Agents streamline DITA XML topic management, while a wide range of other AI-driven actions help authors automate tedious authoring tasks such as generating image descriptions, resolving comments, and refining XML structures. Additionally, AI-powered development actions have been introduced for tasks such as code explanation, code generation, documentation, and refactoring.

The upgraded JSON editing tools grant developers the ability to transform JSON content using XQuery processing, advanced customization options, and streamlined code templates. The update also includes expanded support for XQuery 4.0 and XSLT 4.0 with the upgraded Saxon 12.5 processor. Furthermore, enhancements were implemented for YAML, HTML, Markdown, and some of our popular add-ons, along with essential security updates.

For Oxygen XML Web Author version 27, in addition to the new features for the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant plugin, users can enjoy improved review and editing capabilities, support for Markdown and other non-XML files in the file comparison and merge tool, and experimental support for editing DITA maps in a specialized tree editor. This release also includes important component updates, bug fixes, and security enhancements for the innovative web-based XML authoring tool.

Oxygen Publishing Engine version 27 comes with additional customization options for producing WebHelp and PDF output.

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What's New in Oxygen XML Editor 27

Oxygen XML Editor version 27 is the latest major release of the ultimate toolkit for content authors, developers, collaborators, and publishers. This release is packed with innovative new features and improvements for the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant, the powerful add-on designed to enhance productivity and assist writers by providing support for using AI-generated content within the various Oxygen tools.

The Oxygen AI Positron Assistant now leverages the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process to obtain relevant context from the users' project or from website content that integrates the Oxygen Feedback search functionality. The AI Positron Fix action now also utilizes the RAG process to enhance the AI's response and Function Calls can be referenced in custom actions to give the AI more context information that leads to more accurate responses.

Intelligent Agents is a new category of actions for the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant, designed to streamline DITA XML topic management. These intelligent agents go beyond simple content manipulation, offering advanced capabilities to save files, add references, and access a wide range of functions for contextual understanding and project structure modification. A variety of other common AI actions for DITA authoring were implemented, such as actions to proofread content, resolve comments, improve the XML structure, reuse components, generate documentation drafts, and more. An AI category was also added to the XML Refactoring wizard to perform repetitive tasks for DITA content such as generating alternate text for images, adding missing short descriptions, and shortening existing short descriptions.

Interface improvements related to the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant include a new AI Positron Assistant drop-down widget that offers a very quick and convenient way of accessing useful AI actions. It also contains a helpful Rewrite Content action that opens a floating input box where users can provide the AI with instructions on how to rewrite selected content. Custom user-defined AI actions can be configured to appear as Quick Assist fixes in the editor. Support was also added for Vision models, allowing the AI to read and interpret images. Users have new AI models to choose from, including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-4o, and GPT-4 Turbo, and the Oxygen AI Positron Enterprise Edition provides the ability to use a specific AI engine (OpenAI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, or Anthropic Claude). Other miscellaneous improvements and security enhancements were implemented for the AI functionality as well.

Several built-in AI development actions have been introduced, including Explain Code, Chat About Code, Document Code, Generate Code, and Suggest Refactoring, which can be used to enhance coding efficiency and documentation. Additionally, users can define custom AI actions for various document types such as XSLT, Schematron, XSD, CSS, XQuery, JSON, and JSON Schema.

JSON users can now transform their content using XQuery processing and the XQuery Builder view can be used to compose complex XQuery expressions to be executed over JSON documents. Some indentation improvements were implemented, such as the ability to indent a particular selection of content rather than the whole document, content inserted by the Content Completion Assistant is automatically indented, as is pasted JSON content. Some customization options were also added and code templates were improved to streamline the JSON editing process.

For XSLT and XQuery developers, the built-in Saxon processor used for transformations and debugging was updated to version 12.5, including support to handle Saxon's latest extension functions. Support was also added for XQuery 4.0, which means users can run transformation scenarios for version 4.0 documents from the editor or the XQuery Builder view, and can edit them with complete support for content completion, syntax highlights, and more.

Additionally, the new Apply All Default Quick Fix Proposals tool makes it possible to apply all proposed fixes on multiple resources at once. New features and enhancements have been added for working with YAML, HTML, and Markdown documents, as well as for handling file comparisons. Various other miscellaneous productivity improvements are also included.

Some of the popular add-ons were updated such as the Git Client and Terminology Checker. As always, this release also provides various important component updates, API additions, bug fixes, and security enhancements.

Moreover, Syncro Soft has earned the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, demonstrating a strong commitment to implementing top-tier information security practices and ensuring that the users' data is protected to the highest standards.

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

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What's New in Oxygen JSON Editor 27

Oxygen JSON Editor version 27 includes all the JSON-related features from Oxygen XML Editor and this new version improves the AI functionality, introduces XQuery processing over JSON files, support for applying all default Quick Fix proposals, and more.

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

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What's New in Oxygen XML Scripting 27

Oxygen XML Scripting version 27 offers various updates to the Compare Directories script.

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

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What's New in Oxygen XML Web Author 27

Oxygen XML Web Author version 27 is the latest major release of the innovative web-based XML authoring tool. This release is packed with innovative new AI features and improvements that have been implemented in recent updates to the Oxygen AI Positron Assistant Enterprise for Web Author plugin, the powerful productivity-enhancing tool that provides users with the ability to use a specific AI engine (OpenAI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, or Anthropic Claude) and help them leverage AI-generated content. Users can also look forward to new features for the file comparison and merge tool, support to make DITA maps editable in a specialized tree editor, some general editing improvements, and various security enhancements.

The AI Positron Assistant now uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process to generate more meaningful responses by obtaining relevant context from the current document or a documentation site that utilizes Oxygen Feedback's search functionality.

A variety of new actions designed to streamline DITA authoring were implemented for the AI Positron Assistant. These DITA-related actions help to improve the structure of documents, proofread content, resolve comments located within topics, generate alternate text for images, expand a draft of a DITA topic, or to split large DITA topics into smaller modules.

Other miscellaneous additions for the AI Positron Assistant include the ability for the users to filter the list of AI actions to exclude those that are not considered useful. Favorite prompts now can also be stored for easy future use. A user-friendly UI button makes it easy to edit messages before sending them to the AI. Additionally, the document type and any content selected in the main editor area is automatically passed as context for the conversation, making responses more relevant.

General editing improvements bring the ability to highlight document content using predefined colors that are accessible from a toolbar drop-down menu, and the Outline pane is now editable within concurrent editing sessions (previously, it was displayed as read-only). For Git integrations, a new specialized editor was added to enable the editing of plain text.

The file comparison tool now supports comparisons of Markdown and other non-XML files and the merge tool now allows users to manage comments and tracked changes with contextual actions.

The option to disable or relax the Content Security Policy is now also available. Furthermore, new URL parameters have been introduced to control how excluded content is presented or to enable text and Markdown editing.

This release also provides various component updates, bug fixes, and security enhancements.

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

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What's New in Oxygen Publishing Engine 27

Oxygen Publishing Engine version 27 encompasses the improvements and additions implemented in Oxygen XML WebHelp and Oxygen PDF Chemistry. This version adds additional customization options for producing WebHelp and PDF output, as well as support for PDF signing.

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

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DITA-OT Day 2025

On the 16th of February, 2025, Oxygen XML organizes the 9th edition of the DITA-OT Day conference, this time in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is a full day, in-person event dedicated to the DITA Open Toolkit project, which is the reference DITA implementation and the core of almost all DITA-based publishing solutions (Oxygen Publishing Engine included).

Find out more details and registration information at https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2025/dita-ot_day.html

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We hope you will enjoy our latest release of the Oxygen XML suite of products!
As always, thank you for your support and don't forget that feedback is welcome!

Best regards,
Alin

-- 
Alin Belu
Oxygen XML Editor