LIFT Text Transcoder Main Page

 

• 1. Upgrading from previous versions
• 2. Changes
  • 2.1. Changes in version 1.9
  • 2.2. Changes in version 1.8
  • 2.3. Changes in version 1.7
  • 2.4. Changes in version 1.6
  • 2.5. Changes in version 1.5
  • 2.6. Changes in version 1.4
  • 2.7. Changes in version 1.3
  • 2.8. Changes in version 1.2
• 3. Known issues

 

If you are upgrading LIFT Text Transcoder to version 1.9, you need to follow these simple and quick steps:

1. Log in as root.
2. Stop the Tomcat service:

   service tomcat4 stop
   chkconfig tomcat4 off
           

3. If you are running Red Hat 7.3, you need to install the following packages:

   rpm -ivh libgcc-3.2.2-5.fdr.0.rh73.i386.rpm
   rpm -ivh libstdc++3-3.2.2-5.fdr.0.rh73.i386.rpm
   	

4. Install the required LIFT RPM packages:

   rpm -ivh lift-common-1.0-1.i386.rpm
   rpm -ivh lift-mozilla-1.7.12-1.i386.rpm
   rpm -ivh lift-tomcat-5.0.28-1.i386.rpm
   	

5. Install the updated LIFT Text Transcoder package, with the following command:

   rpm -Uvh lift-text-transcoder-1.9-1.i386.rpm
   	

6. If you installed LIFT Text Transcoder Web Admin, please install its updated package, with the following command:

   rpm -Uvh lift-text-transcoder-admin-1.9-1.i386.rpm
   	

During the installation a new Linux user is automatically created, named "lift" whose default password is "lift". You should change its password (if you are not the Linux administrator, or don't know how to do it, ask him/her to do it for you; this is critical for security).

LIFT Text Transcoder will automatically import the configuration file tt_config.xml, the serial number serial-number.txt and the installed annotations from the previous location. If you changed the Tomcat 4 configuration file /var/tomcat4/conf/server.xml, you will need to change /opt/lift/tomcat/conf/server.xml accordingly.

If not used by other applications, as LIFT Machine, the following old packages can now be removed from the system, they are no more used by LIFT Text Transcoder:

rpm -e tomcat4
rpm -e mozilla-liftmachine
    

   

• Updated the main LTT components: Tomcat 5.0.28, Mozilla 1.7.12 and Cocoon 2.1.7.
• Mozilla, Tomcat and LIFT Text Transcoder packages are now installed under /opt/lift directory.
• Added cookies handling to the Javascript Environment.
• Now it is possible to open not transcoded documents from a web application running in text-only mode.
• Added server side form validation.
• New frameset urls representation: reduced framed pages footprint.
• Added an automatic fix to Internet Explorer focus bug on skip links.
• LTT now blocks some SPAMbots.
• Now it is possible to run LTT on port 80 by simply editing /opt/lift/tomcat/conf/server.xml.
• Removed the cron restart on crash, now it is handled by the new Tomcat daemon.
• Improved performance and reduced footprint.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.
• The Web Admin optional package has an improved Servers page.

 

• LTT will now produce HTML 4.01 Strict documents, with improved quality of generated documents.
• Supports LINK element when it defines document relationships (Index, Previous Page, Next Page, Author, Copyright).
• LTT can now include the IFRAME content directly in the transcoded page (using annotations).
• Improved the HTTP error page content by adding a link to the previous page.
• Removed View frames individually option.
• Increased cookies support.
• New Annotation Engine for HTTP Requests.
• Added Javascript Enviroment to the Annotation Engine.
• Security has been improved. If LTT is processing a frameset containing a secure frame, LTT will use a secure connection (with itself) to produce the transcoded frame.
• Improved performance and footprint.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES/WS 4.0 and Fedora Core 4 are supported now.

 

• Transcoder Parameters section renamed to Text Only Options.
• Now HTML frames are shown simultaneously by default.
• Improved external documents handling (PDF, Microsoft Office and multimedia files) and added Open Not Handled Documents Directly option to open those documents without being notified.
• Improved data tables layout.
• The "Unlimited" license allows to specify entire subdomains to be processed by LIFT Text Transcoder.
• Extended XPath to improve the Annotation Engine.
• Performance has been improved.
• Removed the dependency on "Apache Xerces C++" package.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.

 

• Improved cascade stylesheets to help identifying visited links, headers and form controls (new colors) and to show form controls and links getting focus by changing their border and underline style.
• Added the access key T (press ALT + T) to jump to the Transcoder Parameters section.
• New Cookie Manager: now LIFT Text Transcoder handles cookies generated by framed pages and cookies that apply to multiple hosts.
• Support of forms sending POST HTTP requests with multipart/form-data content type. This means that LIFT Text Transcoder now supports file uploads.
• Support of HTTP Base Authentication on frames.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.

 

• LIFT Text Transcoder is now available also on: Sun Solaris 9 for Sparc platform; RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.

 

• New Web Admin optional package. When installed it offers a web-based user interface supporting the most common tasks that have to be performed by the administrator.
• New annotation debugging functionality that allows you to see if and when an annotation is applied.
• New way to display frames: LIFT Text Transcoder is now capable of displaying simultaneously all frames of a page. The user can set a preference to choose between a simultaneous view of frames or an individual view.
• Redirects implemented via META HTTP-EQUIV are now replaced by server-side redirects, totally transparent to users.
• Meta keywords and descriptions are kept untouched. In this way search engines using them can gather them also from text-mode pages.
• Repeated links are now polished. If LIFT Text Transcoder finds two or more adjacent occurrences of links pointing to the same URL, it will collapse them to a single link whose textual label is the concatenation of the original labels. This greatly improves the text-only rendering of bulleted lists of links, where both an image and a textual links are used.
• A number of smaller bugs have been fixed and a lot of smaller improvements in the rendering of text-mode pages have been implemented.

 

• LIFT Text Transcoder is now available also on Apple Mac OS X 10.3.
• Added and improved the logging facilities. In particular LIFT Text Transcoder now creates a startup log containing data about the initialization of LIFT Text Transcoder.
• Fixed a bug related to host names: now LIFT Text Transcoder does not distinguish among lower-case and upper-case host names when checking if they can be transcoded and when determining the annotations to be applied.
• Fixed a bug that prevented LIFT Text Transcoder to process correctly all the character codings. Previous releases worked only with Western (ISO-8859-1), Japanese (Shift_JIS) and Unicode (UTF-8) pages.
• Fixed a bug that affected version 1.2 related to 'mailto:' and 'ftp:' URLs: now only URLs with HTTP or HTTPS protocols are transcoded.

 

• Greatly extended the annotation machinery that allows a webmaster to configure LIFT Text Transcoder so that it produces text-mode pages that are formatted and that contain information and navigation options adapted to the website. New annotations can be used to move navbars to the bottom of the page, to wrap existing content into header elements, to linearize layout tables, to hide unwanted content, to add skip links buttons, etc.
• Improved the layout machinery so that a lot of white (vertical and horizontal) space is removed. This collapses sequences of BR, removes empty P, collapses sequences of spaces. This improves legibility of text-mode pages.
• Added the speed-bump feature to handle end user navigation across the text-mode border. This reduces end user confusion when s/he hits the border.
• Changed the CSS specification for text size in transcoded pages. Now headers are shown with different font size than normal body text, and this improves legibility of text-mode pages.
• Now links within a document (i.e. URL fragments like "#content") are not transcoded. This improves interaction speed as there is no need to request a new page to LIFT Text Transcoder.
• Fixed a bug related to spreading of A elements: in XHTML documents that contained empty A elements (like in <A name="content"/> or <A name="content"></A>) LIFT Text Transcoder produced incorrect results (due to a bug in its XHTML parser). Part of the problem has been hidden (as visually LIFT Text Transcoder does not show this problem anymore). However the code produced by LIFT Text Transcoder is still affected by this problem.
  There is an easy workaround though, that is also more standard XHTML usage. If you need to write a named anchor inside a document, rather than adding an empty A element (with its NAME attribute set), define an ID for the element you want to point at (for example an H2) and use that ID as the fragment in the link. For example <a href="#content">...</a> ... <h2 id="content">...</h2> ....
• Minor bugs have been fixed and performance has been improved (by using HTTP compression).

 

LIFT Text Transcoder on Fedora Core 4 and Fedora Core 3 requires SELinux to be disabled.

Should you encounter a problem with deploying or using LIFT Text Transcoder, please send an email to tt.support@usablenet.com with a detailed description of what you would expect to happen, what actually happened, and on which page it happened. Thank you.