Andy | 13 January 2017

Beginning with version 7 of the XMLmind XML Editor (aka XXE), XMLmind is offering their Personal Use License again (they ceased doing so after version 5.3). While this is good news, there are some definite changes and incompatibilities between version 5.3 and the current version (7.3).

Here are the main advantages that XXE 7.3 has over XXE 5.3:

  1. XXE 7.3 works well with screens using HDPI technology. The older XXE 5.3, on the other hand, will appear very tiny on these newer screens and may even be almost impossible to read.
  2. XXE 7.3 has dynamic, as-you-type, spelling checking. With XXE 5.3, one had to remember to manually run the spelling checker tool.
  3. XXE 7.3 has a very nice history of where you have been in a document while editing. This makes it much easier to work in one location, jump to another place to make a change, and then quickly come back to where you were. XXE 5.3 had a bookmark capability that was harder to use.
  4. If you do not meet the conditions of the Personal Edition License, XMLmind will sell you a Professional Edition license for version 7.3+.

Here are the disadvantages I’ve noticed so far:

  1. XXE 7.3 is slower to load large documents than XXE 5.3 was. In one test using a 255 page document with a lot of interlinear examples, XXE 7.3 took 13:30 minutes to load while XXE 5.3 took about 5:00 minutes. XXE 7.3 takes a bit longer to produce PDF (3:30 versus 3:00 minutes). Note: I heard from XMLmind on this issue on February 8, 2017. They are looking into possible ways to speed up the load time. They hope to have some improvements in the next release (7.4). We will try and keep you posted.
    February 14, 2017 update: With one change in XLingPaper, the load time went from 13:30 minutes down to 5:27 minutes. XMLmind tells me that with this change, their timing was about 3 minutes. With another change in the code of XXE, it took them only 10 seconds to load this large file. So we are looking forward to when XXE 7.4 comes out: it looks like loading large documents will be much, much faster than they ever were with XXE 5.3.
  2. The screen appearance is slightly different, but hopefully this will prove to be a minor issue.
  3. When using type elements which have text in a ‘before’ and/or ‘after’ attribute, the text does not appear until one does a View / Redraw command (or reloads the document).
  4. XMLmind no longer supports version 5.3 of the XMLmind XML Editor. They will not sell you a Professional Edition license to version 5.3.