Original author(s) Initial release April 2003 | Developer(s) YesLogic Pty Ltd | |
Stable release 11 / December 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12) Operating system | ||
Prince (formerly Prince XML) is a proprietary software program that converts XML and HTML documents into PDF files by applying Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). As technology, in electronic publishing and dynamic data-driven PDF generation, it enables the replacing of XSL-FO frameworks by CSS3 ones.
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It is developed by YesLogic, a small company based in Melbourne, Australia. Marketed as a professional "XML+CSS3 to PDF" solution, it received positive reviews and was considered a unique product in the 2000s.
History
In April 2003, Prince 1.0 was released, with basic support for XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and arbitrary XML. This first version was a command-line program that supported Microsoft Windows and Linux; there was no graphical user interface for Windows yet.
In subsequent releases, CSS support was steadily extended until it was comparable with web browsers such as Opera and Mozilla Firefox. It has also been expanded to support additional platforms—the latest offering include packages for the Apple Mac, Freebsd, and Solaris platforms.
In December 2005, Prince 5.1 passed the Acid2 test from the Web Standards Project. It was the third user agent to pass the test, after Safari and Konqueror.
Technical summary
Prince was developed using the Mercury functional logic programming language.
The main driving force behind Prince is the standard CSS3-paged that integrates paged media (including PDF) layout specification with any other W3C technologies: HTML4, HTML5, XHTML, and "free XML", working or not with JavaScript.