The M020 release of APP 11.2

New debugger stuff:

  • We’ve added a ‘Display’ inspector panel. I found I was using ‘display’ in the Watched Expressions a lot, so it made sense to add this as a separate panel so you can easily interrogate the formatted page.
  • When you’re looking at ‘display’ objects, any object which can be highlighted in the WYSIWYG view now has a little icon next to it to allow you to turn highlighting on and off so you can easily identify which line or cell or whatever you’re interested in.
  • When you open a control stream tag for editing, we’ve provided an ‘Object’ view alongside the ‘Text’ view. This will make it easier to understand the control stream, and also to make it more simple to edit. Tools to manage the objects within groups in the control stream (eg matches in a context control stream) just missed the QA cut-off, so expect them in M030.
  • When you look at an object, some properties refer to objects which are represented by tags in the document. If this is the case, you will now see a red magnifying glass icon which, when clicked, will open that tag in the editor. For example, if a frame has a text stream, when you view the fFrame object, you will now be able to easily open the text stream held by that frame when looking at the ‘text’ property.
  • We have done some work to allow the fRules object to be a control stream. In the past there has been a mismatch with some objects taking a control stream to define rules (accolades, for example) and others taking an object. This standardisation should improve usability of rules across the board.
  • Context conditions (the if/else-if/else conditions within context matches) now have an FOM representation, which means it is possible to edit them in the object view (see above).
  • We’ve added a new fLocale object which, at the moment, allows locale-specific string comparison for sorting and string break analysis (character, word, line, sentence) which will be useful when figuring out if something can fit in the measure or you simply want to count words.
  • Remember how we made it possible to save APP files as a folder of tag files? We’ve extended this slightly now to allow that folder to be a ZIP archive. If you save a file as a .3dz file, it will create the archive which can then be opened again by APP. Be aware that very large documents with thousands of tags do take a while to save like this!

 

The release notes say this:

  • Allowing APP to optionally run without Perl installed, either by not finding the DLL, or by setting the “-noperl” command line flag.
  • Fixed crash with page sequences after ending a blank page that doesn’t contain any frames from the main content page (SPR 7079520)
  • Fixed crash with fIndex.includePaths (SPR 7355573)
  • Fixed pointer error using multiple “autocopy” document sequence master pages (SPR 7328347)
  • Updated PStill library to fix issues with embedded fonts in EPS files (SPR 7268103)
  • Fixed fFrame.rasterScaleX and fFrame.rasterScaleXSize so they return the correct values (SPR 7362142! )
  • Fixed hang caused by a rotated spanning cell being too tall for the column width (SPR 7377954)
  • Fixed possible values returned from fTableCell.horizontalAlign and verticalAlign properties. (SPR 7398682)
  • Fixed issue with JS Printer Driver space function (SPR 7474672)
  • Added properties to gradient and raster colours in the XML printer driver (SPR 7232841)
  • Fixed issues with fAccolade.rules (SPR 4911990)
  • Fixed XML printer driver output with nested blocks (SPR 7366217)
  • Fixed issue with saving to files with non-supported extensions (! SPR 7473638)
  • And the FOM notes say this:
  • Added fApplication.perlInstalled property.
  • Added fTypeface.hasCharacter() method.
  • Added fTypeface.weight, italic, proportion, and familyType properties.
  • Added fIndexAdvancedItem.entryFreeFormElement property.
  • Added fContextCondition object.
  • Added fContextMatch.conditions property.
  • Added fContextMatch.addCondition(), clearConditions, and removeCondition() methods.
  • Added fTemplate.zipArea property.
  • Added fTableCel! l.ALIGN_DEFAULT and VALIGN_DEFAULT constants.
  • Added fBlockRegion.ALIGN_DEFAULT and VALIGN_DEFAULT constants.
  • Added fLocale object.
  • Modified fRules to inherit from fControl.
  • Added fContent.rules property.
  • Added fContent.createRules() and getRules() methods.
  • Modified fFrame.rules, fAccolade.rules and fAccoladeInline.rules properties to be settable.