12. 2.000beta7b

Enhancements | Fixes | Incompatibilities

12.1. Enhancements

The new features in this version are:

Object catalog formatting

Subsections support

Appending text to phrases

New figure attributes

Other 2.000beta7b goodies

Details are given below.

12.1.1. Object catalog formatting

The user can now control how a catalog of objects (e.g. a table of references) is presented by setting the columns and compact parameters. columns is a comma-separated list of:

   [tag":"]attribute

where:

tag is a phrase style (or expression format)
attribute is the name of an attribute of the class.

compact is a boolean flag which reduces the spacing between the rows in the table.

This feature is extremely useful for building "project overview" Web pages. See the SDF document catalog for an example.

12.1.2. Subsections support

The new subsections macro can now be used to specify the subsections in a topic. This has several advantages:

subsections can be given a hypertext id which contains the current topic name (making them unique)
for HTML, a "jump line" can be generated.

For example:

   H1: MyApp
   !subsections "Purpose,Usage,Description,Examples"

In this case, the subsections macro changes the id generated for the headings listed to:

   MyApp - heading

For HTML, it will also generate a line of jumps to the headings.

12.1.3. Appending text to phrases

Event processing on phrases has now been extended to support appending text to a phrase, i.e. prepending text to the rest of the paragraph. Text is appended by setting $append. For example:

   !on phrase 'PRD';; $append .= '(tm)'

Note: This feature is used to provide "qsd-style" (document name and code) expansion for REF phrases.

12.1.4. New figure attributes

The IMPORT phrase style and the import macro now support new attributes:

base - the prefix to prepend to the figure pathname to get the location needed for the HTML output
jump - the URL to jump to
border - the border width in pixels.

These attributes are currently only supported for HTML output.

12.1.5. Other 2.000beta7b goodies

The table filter now supports new attributes:

cellpadding - the pixels between the cell boundary and contents
cellspacing - the pixels between cells.

These attributes are currently only supported for HTML output.

In topics mode, the default header for the main topic now contains jumps to the next and previous topics.

The Values subroutine can now be used to lookup the value of an attribute for an object in a class.

Calculation subroutines can now be defined for attributes in a class. See perllib/sdf/values.pl for examples.

Unzipping SDF 2.000beta7a on MS-DOS caused problems as symbolic links on Un*x were not being unzipped correctly. This should now be fixed - the new distribution does not contain symbolic links for files, just directories.

SECT phrases are now output again in PostScript documents. (However, there is a still a bug in the cross reference support which caused this problem.)

A number of obscure errors in formatting list items for HTML are now fixed.

Warnings are now produced again for unknown parameters to filters. (This was broken by the performance enhancements added in 2.000beta5, I think.)

An error is now output for tables which have repeated headings. Previously, columns were silently "ignored".

A "noheadings" table with no data rows no longer produces unexpected output.

A number of problems are now fixed in the mincom/mims library. In particular, the screen dumps for MSM000A and MSM000B now look as they should.

12.3. Incompatibilities

The sdf2mimsus and sdf2qsdus aliases have been renamed to sdf2mimsl and sdf2qsdl respectively.