This release includes various new features, stability improvements, and security fixes. If you are on a Mac or PC you should additionally ensure that the Docker Desktop application is up to date.
The highlights are:
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Replace document rendering tools with PyMuPDF
Dangerzone internally used multiple standalone programs to aid the various aspects of transforming a document into pixels. However, these started presenting integration challenges that could cause slowness or space issues. By using the PyMuPDF module instead, the conversion-related code becomes much simpler and thus, less error-prone. Unexpectedly, this change opened the door to many future technical improvements to Dangerzone summarized in this diagram. This may result in minor differences in the produced PDFs, particularly in fonts. We have documented some of these differences visually here. -
New file extension support: EPUB, SVG and other image formats
Including PyMuPDF (described above) in Dangerzone enabled us to add these new file formats at no extra effort. Additional formats like PSD or MOBI will be added in the future when all the different supported platforms have a version of PyMuPDF recent enough to support these other file formats. -
Removal of timeouts
Some documents would timeout after a certain time (depending on the file size and number of pages) if the conversion did not complete until then. Timeouts existed due to to some document conversion commands indefinitely hanging. While it is still true that some documents may take a very long time, having the document stop after an arbitrary amount of time does not look like the proper solution. So we have chosen to remove timeouts entirely, for now. We may revisit this idea in the future, better integrating it into the user interface. -
Support for Fedora 39 (Linux)
The unavailability of a core component of Dangerzone (PySide2/PySide6) made it impossible to release our software when Fedora 39 became officially available (#606). We are pleased to announce that we managed to overcome this challenge by packaging this very component and distributing it from our software repositories.Special thanks go to @sudwhiwdh, who informed us once Fedora 39 was out, offered some style fixes, and beta-tested an early Dangerzone release on Fedora 39.
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New license: AGPL v3
Dangerzone was originally licensed under the MIT License until version 0.5.1. The PyMuPDF project though, which we are including in this release thanks to its significant improvements to Dangerzone, is licensed under AGPLv3. In order to comply with the license's terms, we have decided to switch the Dangerzone license to AGPLv3 as well. This change should affect only entities who are offering Dangerzone commercially, as part of a closed-source offering. -
Community contributions
Two cheers for first-time contributors @EtiennePerot and @prateekj117, who offered some fixes in our build system (#721, #671), and one more cheer for recurring contributor @OctopusET, who added support for converting HWP documents on macOS systems with Apple Silicon chip (#498).
On a final note, we'd like to inform users of the Dangerzone CLI on Windows that the latest Docker Desktop release (v4.27 as of writing this) has a bug that affects Dangerzone. If you use the Dangerzone CLI, you may see that it always attempts to re-install the container image. This bug is benign and will be fixed in Docker Desktop v4.28, but there's an official workaround if it affects your workflow. Please note that users of the regular Dangerzone GUI are not affected by this issue.
For a full list of the changes, see our changelog.
Edited on March 19, 2024: We have rebuilt the Dangerzone MSI for Windows using WiX toolset v3.14. Originally, we had built it with v3.11, but we wanted to update to the latest version for good measure. The Dangerzone application has remained exactly the same, but the contents of the MSI file have slightly changed, due to the new WiX toolset. As a result, we have changed the name from Dangerzone-0.6.0.msi to Dangerzone-0.6.0-1.msi.
