Several weeks after the official release on the Premium servers, we are proud to announce the availability of LiveDocx 2.1 for all free accounts. As always, the free accounts are limited to 250 documents per day and some features are not available such as PDF/A export and the Adobe PDF document settings.

Feel free to use LiveDocx 2.1 by pointing to the new WSDL:

https://api.livedocx.com/2.1/mailmerge.asmx?WSDL

What is new in LiveDocx 2.1?

LiveDocx 2.1 is based on TX Text Control X8 - the latest version of our very own backend software to create and modify documents. The following template features are now supported in LiveDocx 2.1

• Background images
• Transparent text frames
• Image merging
• Colored page borders
• Merged table cells
• Overlapping objects (images, text frames)
• Improved DOC and DOCX compatibility
  

You are welcome to provide your feedback about this new version in our support forum:

http://forums.textcontrol.com/forumdisplay.php?23-LiveDocx-Support

Happy coding!

During the last two weeks, Premium users were able to successfully test the final LiveDocx 2.1 version in a closed beta program. We are happy to announce that LiveDocx 2.1 is now available for all Premium users. New subscribers are getting a 2.1 account automatically. All LiveDocx 2.0 features including image merging are now available on Premium servers as well.

What is new in LiveDocx 2.1?

LiveDocx 2.1 is based on TX Text Control X8 - the latest version of our very own backend software to create and modify documents. The following template features are now supported in LiveDocx 2.1:

• Colored page borders
• Merged table cells 
• Colored table lines
• Background images
• Transparent text frames
• Overlapping objects (images, text frames)
• EMF image support

Additionally, LiveDocx 2.1 can load more templates that were refused by older versions of LiveDocx.

If you are still using the free service and waited for LiveDocx 2.1, benefit from our 2 months for free campaign and order your Premium account today.

Finding a good day and time for installing patches or updates on a server is always tricky. After analyzing our service statistics, we figured out that patching on Monday morning at 5AM (Central European Time) creates the least impact.

Up until now, we patched our servers manually after extensive testing, but we decided to automate this process. As such, you may find degradation in performance or a potential interruption of service on Mondays at the announced time.

We have been seeing some slowdowns in our document creation recently. And there were some requests in the last couple days where the free LiveDocx service was affected to the point of extreme slowness or temporary inaccessibility.

We apologize for any inconvenience and will work to avoid future issues.

We are very happy that LiveDocx is getting more and more popular, but as always, there is the famous other side of the coin. The more people are using this service the more server load we are experiencing. We already improved several parts of LiveDocx to avoid such a slowdown and we are very sure that we are prepared for the next wave.

It is our goal to offer you a stable and usable, free web service and we will improve this as best as we can.

To gain more information about the situations in which LiveDocx is getting slower, we would like to encourage you to send us your stack traces or any other information you can provide when you are not able to use the LiveDocx service.

Just send everything directly to: support@textcontrol.com

Thank you very much and happy holidays!

About 2 weeks ago, we already revealed the new amazing features of LiveDocx 1.2: 

What to expect of LiveDocx MailMerge API 1.2

We are glad to announce that LiveDocx 1.2 has just been released. The new features are:

• Create images or thumbnails from document pages
  
• Save documents as HTML
• Create multiple documents in one run
• Reduced file sizes
• List of all available fonts

The new API 1.2 can be used right away with your already uploaded templates. You simply need to replace your service reference. The new WSDL can be found here:

https://api.livedocx.com/1.2/mailmerge.asmx?WSDL

The updated documentation is also available:

http://www.livedocx.com/pub/documentation/api.aspx

We would be glad to get your feedback on these new features. Feel free to post your comments and enjoy LiveDocx 1.2!

LiveDocx is getting popular very fast. We are receiving more and more requests regarding a paid premium service for LiveDocx.

We thought that it is the best way to ask you – our users – what you expect from such a premium service. Therefore, we created a quick survey which doesn't take you more than 2 minutes to complete. We would be glad, if you can help us to find the best way to provide you with the best possible service plan.

Please find the survey below:

We just set up a LiveDocx health checker on our servers that tweets the results directly to a new dedicated Twitter account. The health monitor checks the availability of the Web service definition (WSDL), the functionality of the database and the time it takes to login in order to send appropriate messages to the Twitter account.

The more users, the more traffic, the slower the connection. Generally, the performance is very good and stable, but when a lot of users are creating loads of documents at the same time, your experience might not be ideal.

Feel free to follow us on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/livedocx

We received loads of requests regarding the SSL encrypted version of LiveDocx. Finally, the API (api.livedocx.com) is now accessible using HTTPS:

https://api.livedocx.com/1.0/mailmerge.asmx

To enable SSL encryption in your existing projects, you simply need to switch to this new API. All traffic between your application and the LiveDocx service is encrypted. Of course, it is always recommended to use SSL for all sensitive data.

The non-SSL version is accessible as well and won't be deactivated as long as there are users for it. 

After long weeks of working on our core product TX Text Control, we are gathering new ideas and strategies for the future development of LiveDocx.

The next version of LiveDocx is going to support 3 new merge fields: IF, DATE and INCLUDETEXT.

The IF field can be used to compare a specific field value with an expression in order to insert a "true text" or a "false text". This is very nice for hiding information based on a specific field value. The Date field is quite self-explanatory: It inserts the current date. It is possible to specify the format of the date like this:

The format "dddd, MMMM d" would insert:

Saturday, November 26

The format "h:mm am/pm, dddd, MMMM d" would insert:

10:00 AM, Saturday, November 26

The INCLUDETEXT field can be used to insert the text and graphics contained in the named document. The format of the document will be recognized based on the file extension and can be uploaded to the LiveDocx server like all other normal templates.

The core product TX Text Control will be extended with loads of new features that will be part of LiveDocx as well. A very nice feature is PDF import. This enables LiveDocx users to convert PDF files into editable MS Word documents including images, fonts and text positions. We are thinking about creating specific web services for such tasks. The current LiveDocx service is MailMerge which can be recognized based on the namespace: api.livedocx.com/1.0/mailmerge.asmx

We are thinking about services for converting documents or assembling documents from text boilerplates.

Additionally, a LiveDocx trial version is planned to test LiveDocx on your own IIS server. It is planned to provide LiveDocx including a management tool for the management of databases, user accounts and templates.

I am very interested in your ideas for LiveDocx future developments. Feel free to post them in our forum:

http://www.theimagingsourceforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=23

I just published my LiveDocx overview PowerPoint slides. A LiveDocx partner requested them and I thought to share these slides with the community. Feel free to use the slides when you need to present the LiveDocx idea to your colleagues or management.

LiveDocx.pptx (279.29 kb)

I would be glad to get your feedback on them.