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Release of XMLmind XML Editor, DITA Editor, DocBook Editor and XHTML Editor v8.3

February 21, 2019

Submitted by Hussein Shafie, XMLmind Software.

Personal Editions (free to use by many persons and organizations) may be downloaded from http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/download.shtml

Enhancements:

  • New TEI Lite configuration.

    IMPORTANT

    Only the TEI Lite tagset is supported. Full TEI P5 is not supported. Any customization of the TEI tagset other than TEI Lite is not supported.

    In terms of document editing, TEI Lite support in XMLmind XML Editor is as extensive as DITA, DocBook or XHTML support. However converting a TEI document to other formats (HTML, PDF, EPUB, DOCX, etc) is currently not supported.

    If there is sufficient interest for this work (or if we find a sponsor willing to partially fund this development), we may implement full TEI P5 support and/or TEI document conversion facilities in the future.

    This configuration is available in the form of an add-on called "TEI Lite configuration". This add-on is not installed by default in XMLmind XML Editor. If you are interested, please use menu item "Options|Install Add-on" to install this add-on.

    A sample TEI Lite document created using XMLmind XML Editor is found in XXE_install_dir/demo/tei_lite/tei_lite-sample.xml.

    By reading new user guide "XMLmind XML Editor - Creating a TEI Lite Document", you'll learn to use XXE to create and modify TEI Lite documents. This user guide assumes that you know TEI and XML, but that you don't not know anything about XXE.

    The following minor enhancements were needed to implement the TEI Lite configuration:

    • It's now possible to convert some text to an element whose content validates against a data type. For example, it's now possible to use Edit|Convert to convert text selection "foo:bar" to TEI element gi, whose data type is xsd:Name.
    • Commands addBlockInFlow, promoteListItem, demoteListItem have been made slightly more flexible. The list of inline element names may now be specified using system property "configuration_name inlineElementNames".
    • Configuration linkType now supports attributes which may contain one or more URIs. Specify linkType/link/@href when an attribute may contain a single URI (e.g. XHTML a/@href). Specify linkType/link/@hrefs when an attribute may contain one or more URIs (e.g. TEI ref/@target).
    • Using Options|Preferences, View section, it's now possible to specify the font families used for CSS property values font-family:cursive and font-family:fantasy. By default, the font family used for both these CSS property values is Serif, Java's default serif font family.
  • Improved the clipboard viewer dialog box. See "Clipboard utilities".
    • The clipboard viewer now clearly shows the format of the data found in the system clipboard: XML, Text or Image.
    • It's now possible to switch from XML to Text and, if the text is a well-formed XML fragment, from Text to XML, the latter being useful when you copy XML fragments from a third party application.
  • Documented and added a couple of enhancements related to Byte Order Mark (BOM) support to the Edit|Preferences, Add-on|Text format preferences sheet. See "Text format options".
  • "Paste from Word" add-on: index entries marking a page range (e.g. field XE "XML" \r "OpenXMLPageRange") in the MS-Word document are now partially supported. Partially only, because the "Paste from Word" add-on does not know how determine the end of a range in the HTML generated by MS-Word. Therefore the index terms created by the "Paste from Word" add-on are now correctly positioned at the start of the range, but they are just “plain index terms” and not index terms marking a range.
  • The "Easy Profiling" add-on creates better DITAVAL files out of a .profiles file. When the rev attribute is used for flagging, this add-on now creates a revprop element rather than a prop element. Moreover, a left border or a right border (and no other border) specified using the "Set Style" dialog box is translated to a changebar attribute.
  • Upgraded XMLmind Web Help Compiler (whc for short) to version 2.1.3_03.
  • Upgraded XMLmind DITA Converter (ditac for short) to version 3.4, which contains two important bug fixes related to “flagging” contents using a .ditaval conditional processing file.

Bug fixes:

  • CSS property caption-side was not honored when the subject of the CSS rule had display: table-caption.
  • XHTML configuration: when the style attribute is selected in the Attributes tool, clicking the Edit button displays a specialized editor. In addition to the easy-to-use Styles tab, this specialized editor also has a "CSS Source" tab letting the user type any CSS property she/he wants (e.g. "float: left;"). The bug was that there was to way to make this specialized editor accept CSS properties other than those supported by XXE's CSS engine.
  • The styled view of a DocBook 5.1 assembly displays the title of referenced topics. This displayed title included the text of the indexterm elements found in the title element of the topic.
  • The following error message was misleading: $ xxetool convert docb.toPSFile page.html -s pdf -s "|pdf" -u out/page.pdf xxetool: *** error: command 'docb.toPSFile' not found

    The error message is now:

    xxetool: *** error: did not find command 'docb.toPSFile' in configuration 'XHTML Transitional'
  • The online help browser of XXE displayed a blank window when the computer running XXE was not connected to the Internet.

Incompatibilities:

  • Now that command addBlockInFlow can be parameterized using system property "configuration_name inlineElementNames", native commands xhtml.addBlock and dita.doAddBlock are no longer useful and thus have been removed from all the XHTML and DITA configurations.
  • CSS extensions: icon(collapsed-right) is now an alias for icon(pop-right), icon(expanded-down) is now an alias for icon(pop-down), hence collapser() is now equivalent to collapser(collapsed-icon, icon(pop-right,0), expanded-icon, icon(pop-down,0)).

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