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Release of XMLmind XML Editor v9.3

April 8, 2020

Submitted by Hussein SHAFIE, XMLmind Software.

Enhancements:

  • Any configuration (DITA, DocBook, XHTML, etc): the node path bar can now be configured to display the value of any attribute you want. XHTML example: html > body > pre#example.fancy.line-numbers > code. Character "#" is used to prefix the value of attribute id. Character "." is used to prefix the tokens comprising the value of attribute class.

    These settings are done using a dialog box displayed when selecting the "Customize" item of the contextual menu of the “file icon” found at the very beginning of the node path bar. This contextual menu may also contain a number of checkboxes letting the user quickly hide and show the attributes declared using the "Customize" dialog box.

  • Dragging a document tab and dropping it outside any XXE window (e.g. onto the desktop) now opens a new main window and moves the active document to this new window. It works the same as the "Move Document to New Window" item of the right click menu of a document tab.
  • DocBook and DITA configurations: CALS tables (not HTML tables, not simpletables) layout elements (colspec, spanspec) and attributes (colname, spanname, namest, nameend) are now extensively checked for correctness and consistency. Semantic warnings are added to the Validity tool when errors preventing a table to be correctly rendered are found.
  • Converting a DocBook document to any XSL-FO based output format now generates PDF, RTF, WML, DOCX, ODT files hopefully looking better than before. This is implemented by changing the default values of a large number of DocBook XSL Stylesheets parameters and attribute sets.
  • New add-on called "FlatLaf Look and Feel" containing a clean, simple and elegant “Look & Feel” for XMLmind XML Editor. Many thanks to FormDev Software for having implemented such a nice, fast and reliable Look & Feel for Java Swing desktop applications!

    This add-on is not installed by default. Feel free to download and install it using "Options|Install Add-ons". Once this is done, please select "FlatLight" (light theme) or "FlatDark" (dark theme) from Options|Preferences, General section, Style combobox, then restart XMLmind XML Editor as instructed.

    This add-on is supported on all platforms. It is especially nice to have on Linux where the default “cross-platform”, Look & Feel (called "Metal") looks rather outdated. It may also interest Windows and Mac users who want a dark theme or simply prefer how FlatLaf looks compared to the default, “system”, Look & Feel.

  • "Edit source" add-on: upgraded its RSyntaxTextArea components to version 3.0.8, which fixes a minor XML autocompletion bug.
  • Upgraded the XMLmind XSL-FO Converter (XFC for short) plug-in to version 6.2.
  • Upgraded XMLmind Ebook Compiler (ebookc for short) to version 1.4.1.
  • Upgraded XMLmind Web Help Compiler (whc for short) to version 3.0.1.
  • Upgraded XMLmind DITA Converter (ditac for short) to version 3.7.1.
  • Upgraded XMLmind Assembly Processor to version 1.0.9.
  • Upgraded the "Word To XML" add-on to XMLmind Word To XML version 1.8.1.
  • XMLmind XML Editor, which passed all non-regression tests, is now officially supported on Java™ 14 platforms.

Bug fixes:

  • NOT FIXED: when a file path containing an accented character (e.g. " é ") encoded using a pair of characters —a non-accented character (e.g. " e ") followed by a combining diacritical mark (e.g. " ' ", combining acute accent U+0301; more information in "Unicode equivalence") — to an URL, this pair of characters is not preserved. The pair of characters (e.g. " e' ") is converted to a single accented character (e.g. " é ").

    This Java™ bug may lead to hard to understand "file not found" issues. Unfortunately we don't have a workaround for this bug.

  • Apache FOP options: the "Choose a TTF font and specify its aliases" dialog box picked the localized font family name (e.g. "BIZ UD明朝 Medium") rather the normal font family name ("BIZ UDMincho Medium"). This bug caused FOP to report a fatal error (e.g. BIZ-UDMinchoM.ttc: Name does not exist in the TrueType collection: BIZ UD明朝 Medium) when converting an XML document to PDF.
  • After modifying a document containing inclusions and undoing first modification, it was to possible to redo this first modification.
  • The wait cursor of the help browser kept spinning —making the help browser unusable after that— when moving from one help topic to another and when these two help topics were found in the same help page. For example, when first displaying help topic help_page23.html#foo and when displaying immediately after that help topic help_page23.html#bar.
  • MathML preference "Use bundled fonts" printed a number of "cannot register MathML font java.awt.Font[..." error messages on the console when a set of DejaVu fonts was installed on the computer.

Possible incompatibilities:

  • When converting a DocBook document to any XSL-FO based output format (PDF, RTF, WML, DOCX, ODT), the generated file may look different than in previous versions. For example, when generating PDF, the default values of parameters admon.graphics and admon.textlabel are: admon.graphics=1, admon.textlabel=0. In previous versions, the default values of these parameters were: admon.graphics=0, admon.textlabel=1.
  • We had to implement a large number of minor changes in order to decently support the dark theme of the new, optional, FlatLaf Look & Feel. Some of these minor changes may also impact how CSS extension content objects such as check-box, combo-box, date-time-picker, etc, are rendered.
  • A number of keyboard shortcuts have been removed from the XML source view. For example, Ctrl-NUMERIC_KEYPAD_DIVIDE which collapsed all tags. These keyboard shortcuts were not really useful and seemed to be error prone.

Regressions:

  • The "Google® virtual drive plug-in" add-on has been discontinued due to drastic changes to Google security policies.
  • The "FTP virtual drive plug-in" add-on only supports the FTP protocol. FTPS and SFTP protocol support have been discontinued.

More information in https://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/changes.html


What is XMLmind XML Editor?

https://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

Personal Edition is free to use by many persons and organizations

https://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/download.shtml


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