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Validation plug-in (v5) release notes

Caleb Clauset
  • Updated

With the Validation plug-in, you can check for broken web links and missing file links, and use ISO Schematron 2016 to test for the presence or absence of patterns in XML documents. New in v5, you can also validate XML against a Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML Schema (XSD)—rule sets that define what a valid document of a given type should look like—and insert inline validation annotations directly into your source documents. For more information about the Validation plug-in, please get in touch.

The latest version of the Validation plug-in is 5.0.87, released on 13 October 2026.

We release updates regularly and it's our goal to make sure that our software works well, constantly—that Typefi continues to deliver, every day. If you have any feedback or run into any issues, please drop us a line. We're happy to help.

Validation plug-in 5.0.87

Released 13 October 2026
Requires Typefi Server v8.14 or later
Requires Microsoft Word plug-in v26 or later 

The Validation plug-in v5 introduces three new workflow actions

  • Validate with DTD: Validate XML documents (for example, JATS, BITS, or STS) against your DTD package (the files that define what a valid document of that type looks like). If the DTD package includes an OASIS XML catalog, the action uses it to find the right files. If not, the action finds files by matching filenames. For more information, see Validate with DTD.
  • Annotate errors: Turn a Schematron, DTD, or XSD validation report into inline annotations in your source document. Run it after Validate with Schematron, Validate with DTD, or Validate with XSD to insert editorial comments into a Content XML document, or processing instructions into a plain XML document, at each flagged location, so reviewers can see and resolve issues without cross-referencing a separate report. For more information, see Annotate errors.
  • Validate with XSD: Validate XML documents against an XSD schema. For more information, see Validate with XSD.

Improvements

  • Validate with Schematron
    • You can now use the On error field to choose whether errors found by your Schematron stop the job.
    • You can now restrict validation to a specific phase of your Schematron's rules using the phase parameter in the Parameters field.
    • Renamed from Run Schematron to Validate with Schematron. This is a display-name change only; it doesn't affect your existing workflows.
  • Validate URLs now writes Word comments with bold titles, clickable links to the flagged URL, and the author label "Typefi URL Check," so you can filter them from other Typefi comments in the Word comment pane. For more information, see Validate URLs.
  • Improved the job log messages for missing input files, Schematron compile errors, and remote media links.
  • The job log now shows the Validation plug-in version at the start of each action.

Fixes

  • Validate with Schematron
    • Upgraded the Schematron engine, so Schematrons the previous engine couldn't process, such as JATS Schematrons, no longer fail with the error Validate failed with an exception. IllegalArgumentException. SchematronUtil Exception.
    • Rules marked warning or info no longer fail the job.
    • Leaving the Output field blank no longer fails the job with a NullPointerException.
    • Fixed an issue where the job failed with the error The file in the Schematron field could not be found when the Output file didn't exist yet.
  • Validate URLs
    • No longer fails with a MalformedInputException error when your Validation rules file isn't saved as UTF-8. The file is now read as ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), and the job log shows a warning so you can check that any accented domain patterns still match.
    • Fixed an issue where Convert plain-text URLs added links in places that don't allow them, such as table properties, which caused Export to DOCX to fail later in the workflow.

Known issues

  • The Annotate errors, Validate with Schematron, and Validate with XSD workflow actions drop special characters written as named codes, such as —, that your document's DTD defines. The characters are missing from the annotated file, and validation can report errors that aren't real. This happens because these actions don't read your DTD, which is where these codes are defined. In a future release, these actions will recognise the codes defined in the standard JATS, BITS and STS DTDs.
  • Validate with Schematron isn't compatible with Schematrons that load other files, for example with sch:include or doc(). For security, Typefi Server checks your Schematron before running it, so all your rules and lookup data need to be in a single Schematron file. You'll be able to load files stored next to your Schematron in a future release.

For all known issues, see Validation plug-in known issues.

Validation plug-in 4.0.79

Released 30 April 2026
Requires Typefi Server v8.14 or later
Requires Microsoft Word plug-in v26 or later

Validate URLs workflow action improvements

  • The Validation plug-in has been upgraded for improved speed and reliability. Error messages for failed URLs (for example, SSL failures, connection timeouts, and unreachable hosts) are now reported in plain language in the job log.
    • The Validate URLs workflow action now accepts an Output Content XML (CXML) file, so Typefi inserts a comment in the CXML at the location of each flagged link showing the HTTP status code and reason. For redirected links, the comment also includes the destination URL. If you don't specify an output file, the action logs results only—the same behaviour as previous versions.
  • Use the new Convert plain-text URLs option to find bare URLs in the document body and convert them to live hyperlinks before validation runs. URLs starting with http://, https://, or www. are detected automatically. DOI references (for example, doi.10.1000/xyz123) are converted to https://doi.org/ links. Converted links are kept in the output CXML regardless of the validation results.
  • Use the new Validation rules field to control how Typefi handles redirected links for specific domains. You can upload a plain-text file that defines your per-domain redirect policies. For example, you can suppress redirect warnings for trusted domains like doi.org, or flag redirects from certain domains as errors.

For more information, see Validate URLs.

Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where several HTTP response codes were incorrectly classified. Validation results now correctly reflect whether a URL is broken, restricted, or redirected.

Validation plug-in 3.0.70

Released 9 April 2024 Requires Typefi Server 8.14 or later

Validation plug-in 2.0.65

Released 13 September 2022 Requires Typefi Server 8.7.0–8.13

  • Updated the plug-in to OpenJDK11 to ensure compatibility with the latest versions of Typefi Server 8.7.0 and higher
  • Fixed an issue where validation of URLs sometimes produced incorrect 403 results when 404 was the expected result
  • To be consistent with other actions, line breaks are now the expected separator instead of commas

Known issues specific to Server 8.7.4

  • When typing parameters, certain letters like r invoke keyboard shortcuts instead. This issue will be fixed in Server 8.7.5. As a workaround, please type the parameter in a text editor and copy and paste it into the Parameters field.

Validation plug-in 1.0.43

Released 16 October 2018

First customer release

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