19. 2.000beta5

Enhancements | General Fixes | HTML Fixes | HLP Fixes | Incompatibilities

19.1. Enhancements

19.1.1. Performance

Performance is now 2-3 times faster for most documents. There is still some work to do here, but the performance is now "respectable" (rather than "disappointing").

19.1.2. Perl 5

This release has been tested with Perl 5.002 and is configured to use it, by default. However:

the odd "eval" buglet still (randomly?) appears when using Perl 5
the mif2rtf script has not been tested.

If you wish to use Perl 4 instead, you will need to change the top line of the scripts in the bin directory after installing SDF.

19.1.3. Newsletters

There is now a new style called newsletter.

The title filter now supports a toc parameter for specifying a table of contents. For example:

!block title; toc=$var{'OPT_TARGET'} eq 'html' ? 2 : 0
Name    Value
Title   My Newsletter
Editor  Me
!endblock

This produces a title block for a newsletter and only gives it a table of contents when the target is HTML.

19.1.4. Pre-Filtering

sdfcvt's -p option prefilters the input file for each argument. The (optional) parameter is the filter to use. For example:

        sdfcvt -ptable mytable.tbl

is equivalent to executing sdfcvt on a file which only contains:

        !include "mytable.pl"; table

File extensions can be mapped to filters in sdfcvt.ini. For example, sdfcvt.ini now contains the following:

[PreFilters]
Name    Aliases     Module
table   tbl
module  sdm,sde     frmodule

As tbl is mapped to table, creating nicely formatted tables is now quite easy. For example:

        sdfcvt -p -aformat='15,75,10' mytable.tbl

(The -a option can be used to specify prefilter parameters.)

For a given prefilter, a module can be configured in sdfcvt.ini to be loaded before the filter is applied. As a result, it's possible to do really clever things via autoloaded filters. Examples include:

automatically documenting SDF modules
converting other formats to SDF on the fly.

For example, the following command will build the reference documentation for a SDF module in HTML (real soon now):

 sdfcvt +sdf2html -p abc.sdm

19.2. General Fixes

The sdf2txt stuff now works.

19.3. HTML Fixes

Empty cells now look better. (This was supposed to be fixed by the previous release but I had missed a few.)

Paragraphs with multiple anchors are now handled better (although the odd problem probably remains with this stuff).

If a table of contents is requested and SDF doesn't know the "right" place for it, it is now prepended (rather than being dumped).

Title blocks for correspondence look much better now.

19.4. HLP Fixes

Absolute path names for libraries now correctly go into HPJ files. / characters are now also mapped to \ characters.

Title blocks for correspondence look much better now.

19.5. Incompatibilities

None.