Syncro Soft, the developer of the Oxygen XML suite of products, has released version 18.1 of its XML editing suite of products: Oxygen XML Editor, Author, Developer, Web Author, and WebHelp. The company has also announced the addition of a new Oxygen XML Scripting license, allowing some of the processing provided by Oxygen (such as the extensive DITA validation support) to be integrated in your own scripts.

Although Oxygen XML Editor version 18.1 is a maintenance release that focuses on performance and usability improvements, it also adds a variety of new features. Audio and video content in DITA is now fully supported. Oxygen XML Editor 18.1 allows you to insert media objects, play audio, and display video directly in the Author visual editing mode and includes updates to the publishing workflow to handle video and audio objects in the output.

A new Markdown editor allows you to write, preview, and convert Markdown content into HTML or DITA and you can use Markdown-encoded topics in DITA maps. When validating a DITA map, Oxygen can also validate Markdown documents and transform them in the publishing stage.

Checking for and merging changes is now easier with the new 3-way directories comparison tool and the addition of more syntax-aware diff algorithms. Users can publish the tracked changes and comments made in DITA documents to PDF output, thus allowing you to have the review information that is captured in Oxygen also available as PDF.

The WebHelp Responsive system received numerous updates, including new skins, support for expanding/collapsing components (sections, tables, etc.), automatic image scaling, support for DITA 1.3-specific context sensitive help information, and control over what is indexed for searches. Content completion for XPath and XQuery was improved with new proposals from XPath 3.0 and XQuery 3.0 specifications.

The add-on for working with Saxon 9.7 was updated to provide an action to obtain a compiled stylesheet that can be used with the new Saxon-JS (the JavaScript version of Saxon that provides XSLT 3.0 in the browser).

Oxygen XML Web Author provides a web-based structured authoring tool. The new Oxygen XML Scripting license allows you to automate the execution of the DITA Map Validation and Completeness. For more info, go to https://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen_scripting.html .