Upgrading from 5.3 to 5.4

[JasonBuss]

Hello all,

I am working on upgrading our Arbortext software from 5.3 M040 to 5.4
early this year.

I am trying to get a general feel for backwards compatibility and
composition issues with the various maintenance.

When I upgraded from 5.1F to 5.3 M040, it took a few M0X0 tries to find
one that resolved outstanding issues and contained a minimal amount of
new "issues" that I had to address, so I thought maybe some due
diligence amongst the user community might help me avoid some of that
this time down the road.

Some details:

We use in-house developed SGML and XML document types based on ATA100.

We still use FOSI for all hard copy composition. This includes using
FOSI userules and ACL funcs to generate LOEP/TOC data. We wrote our own
process applications for electronic distribution.

We still use complex floats for images and repeating table titles across
page boundaries. We use algroup quite often for generated tabular data.

We use PE server with Adobe Distiller server, but want to move to the
DirectPDF engine if possible. We don't use indexing or automated
bookmarking.

Between the various maintenance releases of 5.4, are there particular
"gotchas" anyone has come across in upgrading?

I appreciate any feedback anyone can offer.

Thanks,

-Jason A. Buss

[naglists]

we haven't gone 5.4 mxxx yet but just last week (the week before?) someone
here discovered that PTC changed some of the hyphenation rules. it caused
"95 %" to break in small table cells in 5.4 that did not break in 5.3.

[GarethOakes]

Best advice is to make sure you have a testbed system available and a good
test plan J



There are small differences between 5.4 and 5.3, including some tweaks to
the underlying ACL and related packages. There are also some changes to the
composition as Paul has indicated. Therefore, you should probably be testing
all your code paths to smoke out ACL bugs, and also doing some test print
runs to "diff" between your 5.3 and 5.4 PDFs. The Acrobat "PDF Compare"
feature may come in handy for that.



The good news is that with 6.0 right around the corner, the 5.4 series is
stable and mature now J



-Gareth

[ebenton]

So, when is "right around the corner" for Arbortext 6.0?

[Alessio]

Ed,



It is supposed to be released this quarter, according to









Alessio Marchetti
Senior Technical Sales Specialist
E -

PTC.com <">http://www.ptc.com>





From: Benton, Ed L [

[ptc-953926]

Anyone know if 6.0 is included in standard maintenance?

[ebenton]

I noticed that the calendar only begins with 5.3. Has support for 5.2 already stopped?

[GarethOakes]

Hi David,



Any PTC customer holding Arbortext licenses which are on active maintenance
should be eligible to upgrade to the latest release of the software which
those licenses are for.



It is worth noting that the licensing mechanics are changing with Arbortext
6.0. AFAIK, you will not be able to just copy over a 5.x series .lic file to
the 6.0 license folder. Instead, you need to return the existing 5.x license
and obtain a 6.0-compatible license via the PTC online Arbortext licensing
tool.



Of course, the PTC online Arbortext licensing tool is only available for
managing licenses which are under active maintenance.



Cheers,

Gareth

[GarethOakes]

Hi Ed,



I'm afraid you will find that 5.2 is out of support now. The rule of thumb
that PTC applies is that a previous release will only be supported for 18
months after its successor release comes out.



Eg. Arbortext 5.3 was released December 28, 2006. That means 5.2 would have
run out of active support mid-2008.



The product calender shows Arbortext 5.4 was released June 24, 2009. PTC is
making the call that regular maintenance releases for 5.3 will consequently
be discontinued from Feb 1, 2011 after M220 is released. PTC support will
still keep taking 5.3-related support calls until August 1st 2011, after
which time you may be on your own?



(In reality, I've found PTC support to be helpful even where older software
is concerned, but you would be SOL for a software patch. I certainly
wouldn't want to stake my business on unsupported software?)



Cheers,

Gareth