Prince (software)

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 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. In June 2012, Prince 8.1 added support for HTML5. In subsequent releases, CSS support has steadily been extended, both to have comparable support with web browsers (such as Opera and Firefox), and to add support for print-specific features, like page breaks and footnotes. Prince is available for several platforms, including Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Wrappers are available for Java SE, .NET Framework, ActiveX, PHP, Ruby on Rails and Node.js to help integrate Prince into websites and apps. == Technical summary ==

Prince was developed primarily 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. More experimental facilities for print needs (for example, footnote policies, specifying the size of the bleed area of the page when crop marks are enabled, creating running page headers and footers and similar) are being standardized in the Generated Content for Paged Media (css-gcpm-3) CSS module. Prince has good support for CSS, with a print focus: better than web browsers for print-specific CSS modules such as the aforementioned css-page-3 and css-gcpm-3; while support other modules is good relative to other user agents not using a web browser engine but not always as well as web browsers: for example, CSS Flexible Box Model was added in Prince 12 (2018), whereas CSS Grid Layout (css-grid-1) is not yet present in Prince 14. Prince supports most of ECMAScript 5th edition, but not strict mode. Later editions of ECMAScript are largely not supported. ==References==