Release notes for JHOVE 1.0 (beta 3), 2005-02-04

1 General

1. The architecture has been modified to simplify the use of JHOVE with new "front ends." The new JhoveBase class is used in conjunction with the App class to incorporate nearly all the work of setting up a JHOVE instance. The main Jhove class and the App class are now smaller than before.

2. Checksums were often being reported with incorrect values due to an output formatting error that dropped zeroes. This has been fixed.

3. New utilities GDUMP and JDUMP created for GIF and JPEG documents.

4. Error messages are more consistently factored into submessages. This allows messages indicating the same type of error to be more readily grouped.

5. Some modules were reporting a MIME type for a document that is not well-formed. This no longer occurs.

6. Duplicate reporting of AES BitDepth has been suppressed.

7. New module for HTML format. Be sure to update the configuration file, jhove/conf/jhove.conf, to include the module:

   ...
   <module>
     <class>edu.harvard.hul.ois.jhove.module.HtmlModule</class>
   </module>
   ...
   

8. The AES audio metadata representation has been updated to conform with schema version 1.02b (pre-release).

9. New property, sigMatches, has been added to RepInfo. This records which module(s) regarded the signature of the document as a match, even if the document was not well-formed. This is useful in identifying broken documents that are reported as ASCII or Bytestream.

10. The logging API is supported, permitting the generation of debugging messages.

11. All modules are now non-final, so that they can be subclassed by adventurous users.

12. The -p and -P arguments in the command line are no longer supported. Instead, the equivalent parameters can be provided to all variants of JHOVE (including those which don't take a command line) by specifying a <param> element within the <module> element of the configuration file. Example:

     <module>
      <class>edu.harvard.hul.ois.jhove.module.PdfModule</class>
      <param>a</param>
      <param>f</param>
      <param>p</param>
     </module>
    

2 JHOVE Command-line interface

1. The JHOVE command-line interface can now accept directory names, as well as file pathnames and URIs:

       java Jhove [-c config] [-m module] [-h handler] [-e encoding]
               [-H handler] [-o output] [-x saxclass] [-t tempdir]
               [-b bufsize] [-l loglevel] [[-krs] dir-file-or-uri [...]]
   

   All of the files in the directories are processed in a depth-first recursive descent.

3 JhoveViewer (Swing GUI) Interface

1. The JhoveViewer class now allows dragging of a directory or of multiple files, and the output for all files is presented in a single window. This significantly reduces the window clutter.

2. The JhoveViewer presents the module menu in alphabetical order rather than configuration file order.

3. The JhoveViewer was failing to report some submessages. This is fixed.

4. The JhoveViewer was failing silently on certain URL errors; it now puts up an error alert.

5. If an empty module class name is added in the Configuration dialog, it is ignored.

4 AIFF Module

1. Descriptive properties added.

2. Checksum was sometimes missing; fixed.

3. Specification URL added to descriptive information.

4. Reported MIME type changed to 'audio/x-aiff' from 'application/aiff'.

5 GIF Module

1. BitsPerSample is now reported.

6 JPEG Module

1. Errors occurring when parsing an optional EXIF segment were not being reported. This problem manifested itself by incorrectly reporting that the JPEG file is not well-formed.

2. Array size bug in BitsPerSample fixed.

7 JPEG2000 Module

1. Specification information added for ITU.

2. Errors in parsing of an EXIF segment are now reported.

8 PDF Module

1. In certain instances the module was inappropriately reporting well-formed PDF files as being non-well-formed, indicating (incorrectly) that the file does not contain a trailer.

2. Fixed a NullPointerException being thrown with a defective page root tree.

3. Certain broken cross-reference tables would throw the module into a loop. This is fixed.

4. Problems in XMP data that triggered a SAX error were being reported to standard output as a "fatal error." They are now properly reported.

5. Error in offset reporting fixed.

6. Now reports FontFile2 and FontFile3.

7. File trailers are now found more reliably.

8. PDF/A profile updated to latest draft proposal, ISO/CD 19005-1 (2004-09-20).

9. Parameters that would have been specified by the -p argument of the command line are now specified by the <param> element in the configuration file. The sense of these parameters has been reversed; by default, the PDF module presents the maximum amount of information unless suppressed by including the characters a, p, f, or o in the parameter value(s).

9 TIFF Module

1. Adobe DNG tags are recognized, and a DNG profile has been added.

2. Bug in DATETIME checking fixed.

3. Changes in validity tests for PhotometricInterpretation, SamplesPerPixel and BitsPerSample.

4. Corrected spurious null values for some properties.

5. Tag data type checking was badly broken, now fixed.

10 WAVE Module

1. Type 'exif' recognized in LIST chunk.

2. Format and signature information updated.

3. Checksum was sometimes missing; fixed.

4. Reported MIME type changed to 'audio/x-wave' from 'audio/x-wav'.

11 XML Module

1. Now reports 1.0 and 1.1 as versions rather than profiles.

2. Reported MIME type changed to 'text/xml' from 'application/xml'.

3. A base URL for DTD's may now be specified using the <param> element. The URL must be preceded by the letter b to distinguish it from potential future parameters, e.g.,
   

   <module>
     <class>edu.harvard.hul.ois.jhove.module.XmlModule</class>
     <param>bhttp://www.example.com/</param>
   </module>
   

12 XML Handler

1. The "xsi" namespace is now defined in the NISO Image Metadata <mix:mix> and AES Audio Metadata <aes:audioObject> elements. This allows these segments to validate when extracted from the JHOVE output document.

2. The <ImagingPerformanceAssessment> element is properly named; it had been improperly displayed as <ImagePerformanceAssessment>.

3. X and YSamplingFrequency are reported as positive integers ("600"), not ratios ("600/1"), for consistency with the MIX schema.

4. An empty Properties element in the XML handler is now suppressed.

13 GDump Utility

1. New utility to dump GIF files in human-readable form.

14 JDump Utility

1. New utility to dump JPEG files in human-readable form.

15 TDump Utility

1. The output format has changed slightly, e.g.

         00000000: "II" (little endian) 42
         00000008: IFD 1 with 15 entries
         00000034: 254 (NewSubFileType) LONG 1 = 0
         00000046: 256 (ImageWidth) LONG 1 = 2948
         00000058: 257 (ImageLength) LONG 1 = 4620
         ...
   

Release notes for JHOVE 1.0 (beta 2).

For more information: jhove-support at hulmail.harvard.edu