Mako 9.1.0 Release Notes

Introduction

Mako 9.1.0 delivers a broad set of improvements across PDF processing, Apex rendering, PCL conversion, PDF standards compliance, platform support, and developer APIs. The release includes customer fixes, performance improvements, new capabilities and build updates.

Highlights

• Apex and PDF output: Expanded PDF/X and PDF/A support, improved transparency handling, GPU rendering reliability, output progress, custom transform execution, and PDF output robustness.

• PDF quality and compatibility: Fixed invalid output, missing objects, font handling, malformed input recovery, XObject processing, color-space issues, and standards-compliance defects.

• PCL and PCL/XL: Addressed missing text and graphics, clipping, symbol-set mappings, grayscale output behavior, conversion failures, and font-selection visibility.

• Performance and scalability: Improved incremental output size, OCR searchable-layer processing, large-document rendering, dictionary handling, and repeated resource usage.

• Platform and build support: Added or validated Linux shared-library builds, newer Windows toolchains, Debian Trixie builds, Vulkan SDK updates, and MoltenVK compatibility.

• Developer experience: Added GPU selection reporting, image and texture APIs, preview and object-map capabilities, callback support, transform controls, and wrapper consistency fixes.

New Features and Enhancements

Apex rendering and GPU capabilities

• Sampled image and texture support — MAKO-5851: Apex can make rendered images available as sampled textures for post-processing shaders that need neighboring-pixel access.

• GPU image color conversion — MAKO-5019: Added GPU-based conversion for RGB, CMYK, and ICC-managed images to improve rendering efficiency.

• Preview rendering — MAKO-5032: Added support for generating RGB previews from process, spot, or extended-gamut rendering workflows.

• Extended-gamut color conversion — MAKO-5833: Added support for extended-gamut spaces such as CMYKOV in Apex post-processing.

• Selective process components — MAKO-5751: Apex can render selected process components or omit process rendering when only spot components are required.

• GPU selection API — MAKO-5840: Added a way to determine which GPU Apex selected for rendering.

• Object-map and post-processing improvements: Continued the Apex GPU feature set with rendering diagnostics, custom post-processing, and cross-GPU test stabilization.

PDF output and standards

• PDF/X-4 output — MAKO-5676: Added direct PDF output support for PDF/X-4.

• APO transform integration — MAKO-5859: Added a mechanism for APO to execute custom transform chains on separate threads.

API and integration improvements

• Font selection monitoring — MAKO-5743: Added visibility into font requests made by PCL5 jobs before final font resolution.

• XObject inspection and modification — MAKO-5593: Improved support for accessing and modifying XObject content.

• PDF callbacks and output control: Added callback mechanisms for custom output handling and improved integration options for PostScript and PDF workflows.

• Wrapper consistency: Updated SWIG-generated C#, Java, and Python interfaces to align more closely with the C++ API.

Customer Fixes

PDF import, output, and rendering

• Malformed PDF resilience: Improved handling of incorrect cross-reference sizes, unmatched marked-content operators, invalid composite glyphs, malformed JPEG data, and unusual XObject structures.

• PDF output correctness: Fixed missing objects, incorrect form bounding boxes, invalid color spaces, RGB content under CMYK output intents, and incorrect resource dictionaries.

• Font and text handling: Fixed incorrect glyph rotation after XObject expansion, font encoding issues, ligature-related workflows, restricted-font output, and invalid font structures.

• Incremental and OCR output: Reduced file-size growth during incremental saves and improved the performance of searchable OCR-layer output.

• Color and separation workflows: Addressed spot-color knockout behavior, grayscale conversion questions, ICC profile handling, PDF/X-4 color requirements, and Apex separation rendering.

PCL and PCL/XL

• Fixed missing rectangles, text, and separator lines in PCL5 output.

• Corrected PCL/XL clipping and missing-content differences in APO output.

• Fixed PCL/XL conversion failures involving indexed color spaces and large color tables.

• Added or updated symbol-set mappings, including HP Roman-8-related support.

• Improved handling of overlay characters and font-selection diagnostics.

Reliability and performance

• Fixed intermittent and platform-specific unit-test failures.

• Improved behavior for large documents and high-resolution Apex rendering jobs.

• Addressed GPU memory exhaustion, device selection, Vulkan synchronization, and MoltenVK compatibility issues.

• Improved processing of large numbers of images, shadings, color spaces, and repeated XObject instances.

• Corrected a signed-character casting issue in psgetc() that could interrupt stream scanning for binary data.

Platform and Distribution Notes

• Windows builds include Visual Studio 2022 support for x64 and ARM64, with legacy Visual Studio 2019 packages retained for compatibility.

• Linux build work includes Debian Trixie compatibility and an internal shared-library variant for Linux.

• macOS support includes validation against newer Vulkan SDK and MoltenVK versions.

• Supported development interfaces include C++, C#, Java, and Python through SWIG wrappers.

See Distribution for the complete list of platforms supported in this release.