HTTP headers fields (useragent/accepted) now implemented. Anti-aliased gradients (when color-rendering set to quality). Small patterns are now much faster. Now has the ability to flush cached image data. Full horizontal and vertical kerning now implemented for SVG fonts. Added support for orientation and language glyph attributes. Improved support for Arabic text, including handling of Arabic shaping, and ligatures for both SVG and system fonts. Improved text selection and rendering speed.
Full filter effects support - lighting filters, drop shadows, displacement effects and more. Full text support - embedded and external SVG Fonts, international text, vertical text and other fancy text features such as text on a path. Full linking support - with SVG and Batik, you can navigate and link images just like you do with HTML pages. Full support for structural elements such as internal and external use/defs and switch elements. Performance improvements with major work in the rendering engine and the SVG processor engine. Improved SVG generator, which now offers more control over the output SVG. Improved SVG rasterizer (a tool to convert SVG images to raster formats such as JPEG, PNG or TIFF).
This is the initial release of Batik, which provides a good implementation for all the SVG static features, supports linking, and has some scripting support, even though dynamic modification of SVG documents is not yet available and animation is not supported.
