I just took a look at the list of 5.3 features and in addition to the
DITA-related features, here are the main areas of improvement:
* Editor is twice as fast when opening documents with large tables
* Editor is up to 25x faster when displaying large tables
* Publishing Engine's Import/Export capability can capture text from PDF
files (we call this "text capture" instead of "PDF import" because it is
NOT as powerful as Word import); there are some other improvements to
Import too, including the map editor and Word import
* Several improvements to Styler including XPath support for numbering
and improvements to custom table support
* Print composition improvements including: option to add rules to
bottom of table rows when the row breaks across pages; smaller PDF file
size when using PE's "Direct-to-PDF" feature; improvements to PE's
support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean
* Many Publishing Engine improvements; they fall into the following
categories: debugging, stylesheets, subprocess initialization, VBScript
support and documentation
* Publishing Engine will be backwards-compatible with Editor;
specifically PE 5.3 F000 will work with Editor 5.2 M030 and later; this
will let customers upgrade PE and gradually upgrade their Editors
instead of upgrading everything at once
* We made a significant extra investment in improving product quality in
order to work down the list of open bugs
* There are many other smaller refinements in this release...
PG
P.S. To see the new Editor features in support of DITA, especially
Resource Manager and Column View, you can look at the screen shots in
this white paper (warning -- registration may be required):
