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The Definitive Guide Edition 0.7: Focus on Quality

Written by Tim OBrien | August 10, 2009

This release of the Definitive Guide is a dramatic improvement in the quality of the final rendered output. You can see for yourself by:

Here are some of the major changes in the 0.7 release:

  • Images and figures are now print-quality. We invested a significant amount of time making sure that all of our diagrams were properly scaled and included as PDF vector drawing where possible. If you've been reading this book as a PDF, you'll notice a dramatic improvement.
  • Icons and visual cues for notes, warnings, and tips are now rendered in the PDF.
  • The book build now incorporates automatic publishing to Scribd, and we've moved to a newer version of FOP and fop-image-pdf.
  • Improved callout rendering - all code examples with callouts render using the Unicode callout character in the rendered PDF
  • No more code overflows. This is a pet peeve of mine, when you are reading a PDF and a code example leaks beyond the boundaries of a printed page. I've made sure that the book contains none of these problems.
  • A better cover - I've included the cover from the printed version of the book.
  • No more dangling references between sections. Since this book has evolved over time, we've often had situations where one section of a book referenced a section that was moved into one of our other books. In these cases, I've made sure that we reference the new book directly. No more mysterious "???" artifacts in the book PDF.
  • ...and many more quality focused changes.

There were over 105 issues fixed in this release of Maven: The Definitive Guide. For a full list, see the release notes for Edition 0.7 from this book's JIRA project.


Maven: The Definitive Guide