2021 was an exciting year for us. The demand for digital document processing is huge and together with our clients, we were able to develop new technologies, features and products to integrate document processing workflows into business applications very successfully.

2022

Our Mantra: Rethinking Documents

We defined Rethinking Documents as our new company mantra. The focus of all actions is defined by this vision to design how documents are and will be used in business workflows in the future.

Rethinking Documents

Online document editing, document signing, collaboration and other document processing workflows are part of our vision to improve document based processes. We have a clear vision for our components that includes electronic invoicing, digital forms processing and online document collaboration.

2021 was a very productive and successful year here at Text Control. We released several new products, updates and improved features, exhibited at conferences and helped thousands of successful companies to serve their customers and support business continuity.

DS Server Release

Early in 2021, we released our new product DS Server. DS Server combines the powerful word processing libraries of TX Text Control with an easy-to-use Web API approach to access document services.

DS Server brings document processing, editing, sharing, collaboration and creation to any app on any platform. It is basically a backend server that enables the integration of professional Document Services into any application.

Rethinking Documents

Electronic Invoices

We integrated the support to create and extract attachments to PDF/A-3 documents into TX Text Control that enables developers to create electronic invoices and other smart documents.

PDF/A-3 allows attachments in any format to be added to PDF documents. The standard itself doesn't standardize the embedded documents, but the way how they are embedded in the PDF structure. This enables applications to reliably extract the attached document from the PDF document which enables readers to extract only the embedded documents without having to open the complete PDF document itself.

In case of the electronic invoice, a machine-readable part can be embedded (such as XML). The processing application is not specialized in reading PDF documents, but is able to extract the structured attachment which is then processed by the commercial software that is able to read this attachment.

This technology gained a lot of attention in many industries and we were able to work closely with partners to provide a smart way to create and process those documents.

E-Sign Reference Implementation

Together with technology leading clients, we added all essential parts of a document signature technology platform to our libraries to provide a complete set of tools that helps to integrate electronic signature processes into business applications.

In 2021, we released a reference implementation demo that shows how to use Text Control technology to integrate electronic signature workflows. The implementation is a fully functional web application that allows users to request signatures from multiple signers.

Additionally, the demo shows how to implement document signature audit trails, template creation, contract negotiation management and contract creation processes.

Rethinking Documents

Celebrating 30 Years

30 years ago, the first version of TX Text Control has been released. Three decades! In 1991, in the same year when Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website, TX Text Control was born in form of a small DLL with several KBs in size.

Rethinking Documents

This marked the beginning of a wonderful journey through technology and innovation. Fast forward 30 years, TX Text Control is shipped with millions of software distributions around the globe running document processing tasks in all industries. We are very proud to help companies to implement digital transformation processes in today's business world. Since then, billions of documents have been created, printed and processed using our technology.

TX Text Control is shipped with millions of software distributions around the globe running document processing tasks in all industries.

DocumentViewer Improvements

A new version of the TX Text Control DocumentViewer provides annotation and collaboration features to all supported document formats including MS Word DOC, DOCX, RTF and the internal TX Text Control format. The annotations are not stored within the document which allows you to share annotations with all document types that are supported including DOCX, DOC, RTF and PDF. Additionally, the new version supports the completion of MS Word compatible form fields including conditional instructions that can be created using the document editor.

Rethinking Documents

Conferences

We are committed to our developer community. Very early in 2020, it was clear for us that we will support the community and conferences even more during this pandemic. As in-person conferences have been cancelled due to COVID-19, we talked to many conference organizers to discuss how we can help to create an experience on par with offline conferences.

In 2021, in-person conferences were back! Conference organizers considered the health and safety of attendees and staff at every step of the planning process and worked with state and local health officials to implement the rules and guidance. We were fully committed to support the developer community and exhibited in-person at a number of conferences in 2021 in Germany, Norway and the United States.

Rethinking Documents

TX Text Control 30.0 and DS Server 2.0

Recently, we released our latest version 30.0 of TX Text Control with an updated feature-set including .NET 5/6 support, MS Word compatible comments, SVG graphics support, extended character attributes and a new ribbon layout.

Additionally, we released a new version of DS Server with the same feature set based on TX Text Control 30.0 and other improvements with all client-side packages including Angular, React and MVC.

2022 Outlook

We have many ideas for new products and innovations coming in 2022 to help developers with their digital document processing needs. Stay tuned for details - we will publish a detailed roadmap very soon.

If you want to talk about your document processing requirements or our future roadmap, simply contact us. Our engineers would be very happy to help you.

Text Control - Innovations Floor

We are very excited about a new project in Charlotte, United States. We will start building a new office space in an upper floor early next year and move our United States headquarters to the new premises in Q2 of 2022. The plan includes a very open concept with a focus on collaboration and open work spaces.

Open, transparent, communicative. For an effective work in open spaces, we will create a well thought-through office and collaboration concept. Our aim is to support the work processes in modern collaborative environments in the best way possible and to improve the well-being of all team members.

Part of the idea is to provide clients and partners the possibility to work together with our team on ideas and integrations in our Innovations Floor.

Over the next couple of months, we will share the progress of this project - so stay tuned.

Rethinking Documents

The Text Control team wishes all of our customers, partners and friends happy holidays and a successful 2022 full of hope and happiness. We wish you health and joy as you welcome new challenges.

Happy coding!