Release 16.12.1

Date of Release: 15 September 2026

General remarks

• Patch release addressing false positives raised against non-conforming and misidentified files, and a memory failure when exporting or importing very large data blocks to XML.

New features

• XML content export now writes a large value array as a sequence of base64 blocks.
  • Above a size threshold, the exporter writes the payload of a VA element as a series of B block elements instead of a single run of character data. At or below the threshold the exported bytes are unchanged. B applies to the XML interchange format only. See Content Export & Import.

Fixes and improvements

• Fixed issue in XML content export and import where a value array above approximately 500 MB failed with a std::bad_alloc error, well below the advertised 2 GiB input limit. Export now encodes and emits the payload in chunks, and import decodes it in blocks.
• Fixed issue in MPEG where files that are not MPEG were identified as MPEG transport streams.
• Fixed issue in MP3 where UTF-16LE text files were sometimes identified as MP3.
• Fixed issue in ELF where binaries built with the Go toolchain were rejected with "Validation of ELF32_LE_ProgramHeader.p_flags failed". The PT_PAX_FLAGS program header the Go linker emits is now accepted, and only where the file is confirmed as a Go binary.
• Fixed issue in PDF where a named destination with an empty name was rejected. The empty name is now replaced with /gwNull and reported under a new remedy, "Empty name in object content replaced with /gwNull" (RemedyID 197001390), rather than being removed and leaving the rest of the dictionary read out of step.
• GIF structural failures now report granular issue IDs in place of the 167837696 "Failed to parse document correctly" catch-all, so a benign fault can be told apart from a genuine structural failure.
• SVG structural faults now report distinct issue IDs in place of the 386859008 "SVG structure failed validation" catch-all.
  • An unrecognized or malformed declaration is remedied and reported rather than failing the document, provided its extent can be proved.
• Updated the bundled OpenSSL to 3.6.3.
• Updates to the content export schema (gwEditorExport.xsd) to add the B element.

Defects and limitations

• The Word Search Java wrapper compatibility is currently limited to JRE8.
• PDFs generated via the MS Outlook Adobe plug-in are not supported.
• Word Search analysis XML no longer reports structural content or changes.
• Processing times may be impacted by changes made to licensing features.
• Processing files using multiple threads is not supported. Spawning multiple processes is advised to facilitate parallel processing.
• Word Search is provided as a beta feature:
  • text or regex cannot be the same for require or allow/disallow as this will regenerate the file and ignore the disallow or require setting.
  • The pipe symbol (|) at the start or end of require can potentially cause the Engine to hang when using regex search policies.