The main difference in this release over 2.2.7 is a fix for pre V9.4M3 translated ODS templates. The 2.2.7 release fixes a number of transcoding problems but also exposed another unknown issue. Prior to Maintenance 3 for V9.4, the translated ODS templates were in SAS Session Encoding. But as of M3 (M4, M5), the encoding was changed to be UTF-8. It was UTF-8 only that saspy handled. 2.2.8 has support for both utf-8 translated templates as well as session encoded templates.