2026.10 Release Notes

Release date: 27th October 2026

Next release: 8th December 2026

Announcements:

Performance: BuildVu converts a typical file around 13% faster than in the previous release, measured across our 770-file test corpus. Files with soft masks, shadings, patterns or damaged PDF structures gain much more.

Java 27: BuildVu has been tested against Java 27 and no issues were found.

Enhancements:

CORE-4238 Improved performance and quality of form XObjects that have a soft mask or blend mode. One customer file now converts 20× faster and uses less memory:

• Forms are now rendered at the size they appear in the output, instead of many times larger and then scaled down
• Forms are now rendered with antialiasing, and are sharper when scaled up
• Soft masks inside patterns and Type 3 glyphs are rendered at their output resolution, and only over the area that is filled

CORE-4254 Faster rendering of patch shadings (types 4–7). Each shading’s triangles are now indexed once, instead of every triangle being tested for every pixel

CORE-4285 / CORE-4256 ICC profiles are now read once per document instead of every time the colour space is set, including colour spaces used by shadings. One file with a 1.8MB CMYK profile renders almost 3× faster

CORE-4275 / CORE-4276 Faster tiling patterns:

• Pattern cells are drawn once and reused, instead of being decoded again for every fill
• Unrotated patterns are positioned per row and column instead of per pixel

CORE-4296 / CORE-4295 Faster loading of PDFs whose cross-reference trailer has an incorrect /Size. These files were previously treated as damaged, and every object was found by scanning the file

CORE-4281 Recovery of large corrupt Flate streams is around 6× faster, with identical output

CORE-4298 Faster loading of fonts with an embedded CID CMap that maps a large range of codes

CORE-4247 Reduced memory allocation when applying soft masks to images by removing a per-pixel temporary array

JDEL-809 Reduced memory copying when building large in-memory buffers, mostly during Flate decoding. Building a 100MB buffer previously copied around 830MB

JDEL-811 Faster decoding of JBIG2 images with large Huffman symbol tables

CORE-4272 TrueType glyph outlines are now drawn as the quadratic curves the font defines, instead of being approximated with cubic curves. This also reduces SVG file sizes by around 2% in SVG_SHAPETEXT modes

CORE-4286 Added experimental support for JPEG XL images in PDF files (JXLDecode filter)

Fixes:

HTML-4019 Removed duplicate text that is drawn more than once in the same place:

• Exact duplicates are removed, so text no longer looks ghosted or is selected twice
• Near duplicates, such as drop shadows, stay visible but can no longer be selected, matching what Acrobat copies

HTML-4012 Fixed Type 1 fonts with repeated or empty glyph names failing to convert, which left the HTML referencing a missing font file

HTML-4018 Fixed incorrect space widths in generated CFF and Type 1 fonts, which caused missing spaces and differences between Chrome and Firefox

HTML-4017 Fixed text styles missing in singlefile mode when the last page of the document has no text

HTML-4009 [IDRViewer] Fixed the view shifting to the right when zooming in

HTML-4010 Fixed negative text and image positions being placed 1px out

CORE-4238 Fixed several rendering issues with form XObjects that have a soft mask or blend mode:

• Content being lost or shifted when the form’s bounding box has negative or fractional coordinates
• Rotated, skewed and flipped forms being drawn upright or not drawn at all
• Soft masks being misplaced when the mask has its own Matrix, or is set before the form or shape is moved
• Shapes filled under a soft mask repeating the mask outside its bounds, or being misplaced inside forms

CORE-4218 Fixed an extra line appearing along the edge of shapes filled with a soft-masked pattern

CORE-4254 / CORE-4288 Fixed several issues with shading backgrounds:

• Patch shadings drew only their /Background colour, and not the shading itself
• Patch shadings left unpainted pixels when rotated by angles that are not multiples of 90°
• Shadings painted with the sh operator filled the clip with their /Background colour, which the PDF specification says to ignore

CORE-4245 Fixed annotations losing their content when the appearance stream’s Matrix rotates or scales it

CORE-4230 Fixed incorrect colours in annotations whose appearance streams reuse a resource name for different colour spaces

CORE-4251 Fixed incorrect or missing extracted text for fonts whose ToUnicode table maps a character code to several Unicode characters, such as ligatures and emoji

CORE-4252 Fixed text extraction for fonts whose ToUnicode table refers to a predefined Chinese UCS2 CMap, and for characters missing from a predefined Japanese, Korean or Chinese UCS2 CMap

CORE-4291 Fixed incorrect text for fonts using the OneByteIdentityH CMap when the text is written as hex strings

CORE-4244 Fixed an exception when a TJ text array uses line breaks or other PDF whitespace characters between values

CORE-4287 Fixed inline images using the abbreviated DCT filter name

CORE-4246 Fixed sub-pixel clips being rounded incorrectly at negative coordinates

---