Dear GroupDocs customers,
We are pleased to announce the release of GroupDocs.Conversion for .NET v26.8. This release focuses on CAD conversion — you can now choose which layouts to convert and get a separate page, slide or worksheet per layout — and adds XAR and CAB archives, Mermaid MMD as a diagram source and Drawio as a conversion target, along with ten fixes across CAD, email, presentation and Word rendering.
Key New Features
CadLayoutScope: A new property on CadLoadOptions that specifies whether to load Model, Layouts, or Both (default). If the selected scope contains no sheets, the conversion reports it instead of silently falling back.
Per-Layout Output: Converting a drawing with several paper-space layouts previously produced a single flattened result. Each layout now becomes its own output unit — slide, page, worksheet — sized according to that layout’s page setup.
XAR and CAB Archives: Both formats are now supported as source and as target for compression documents.
Mermaid and Drawio: Mermaid MMD files can be used as diagram sources, and Drawio is available as a conversion target.
Major Improvements & Fixes
Missing layout names are now reported by name when a requested layout cannot be found, together with the list of layouts the drawing actually contains.
Fixed DWG to PDF conversion applying the first sheet’s print settings to every page — each sheet now converts with its own orientation and page setup.
Fixed page counting for multi-layout CAD drawings, so GetDocumentInfo().PagesCount matches the number of produced pages.
Fixed a NullReferenceException when a drawing contains inactive layouts.
Fixed CadLoadOptions being ignored when converting CAD to PDF/UA.
Fixed a double unit conversion that produced wrongly scaled output.
Fixed the “Incompatible unit types” exception when converting EML to PDF.
Fixed shape outlines not being rendered when converting DOCX to PDF.
Fixed inconsistent headers and footers in presentation conversions, and fixed handling of broken summary links.
Fixed thumbnail generation on Linux.
Breaking Changes
LoadOptions.Format no longer throws when it has not been set — it returns null, so replace any exception handling around it with a null check:
if (loadOptions.Format == null) { /* handle unset format */ }
CadLoadOptions.LayoutNames now requires exact, case-sensitive matches. A mismatch raises InvalidLoadOptionsException listing the layouts available in the drawing, instead of being ignored.
CAD drawings with multiple layouts now produce separate output units per layout rather than one flattened result. This changes GetDocumentInfo().PagesCount and the number of files produced for such drawings.
The new CadLayoutScope property controls which spaces are converted. When the selected scope yields no sheets, an exception is raised rather than silently defaulting:
new CadLoadOptions { LayoutScope = CadLayoutScope.Layouts }
Useful Links
Full Release Notes – View the complete list of changes and technical details.
Download from NuGet – Update your project to the latest version.
Product Documentation – Explore guides and API references.
If you convert CAD drawings, we recommend upgrading to this version and reviewing the breaking changes above, since multi-layout drawings now produce a different number of pages than before.
As always, we value your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions or feature requests for our upcoming releases!
Best regards,
The GroupDocs Team