3. 2.000

Enhancements | Fixes | Incompatibilities

3.1. Enhancements

As this is the first public production release of SDF, the focus has been to fix bugs and improve the documentation. The enhancements are:

3.1.1. Better documentation

The following documents have been improved:

The SDF Web Site has also been improved by the addition of the following sections:

The PostScript and PDF versions of the documentation have been removed from the core distribution making it substantially smaller. The PostScript and PDF documents can still be accessed as needed from http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf/catalog.html.

The SDF distribution is now CPAN-compliant, thanks to the efforts of Achim Bonnet (ach@mpe.mpg.de). As a result, several things have changed:

installation is much easier
the SDFHOME environment variable is no longer used to find files:
- Perl libraries are now assumed to be available on Perl's library path
- configuration files, including sdf.ini, are now located within the sdf/home directory somewhere on Perl's library path.
the test directory has been renamed to t
the sdftest script is now located within the t directory.

3.1.3. Better support for non-English languages

Russian characters (and characters from other non-English languages) are now hopefully better handled for users running on Perl 5.004 or later. (Thanks to Nikolaj Logvinov for this fix.)

A German locale (de_de.sdl) has also been added. (Thanks to Andreas Lohrum for this.)

3.1.4. Table enhancements

The table filter now supports some new parameters:

colvaligns - a comma-separated list of vertical alignments values (Top, Middle, Bottom, Baseline) for columns. For the lazy people, a single word containing the letters T, M, B and L can be used for the value as well.
select - a comma-separated list of columns to display.
delete - a comma-separated list of columns to delete.

The delete parameter is particularly useful if you want to sort or filter a table (using the sort and where parameters, respectively) using a column which you don't want in the output.

3.1.5. Object management enhancements

Class filters also support the colaligns, colvaligns, select and delete parameters provided by the table filter.

A new feature called object views has been introduced. See Understanding Class Interfaces within the SDF Reference for details.

The catalog macro can now apply the filtering mask to an attribute other than the name. To specify the attribute, use a mask of the format:

       attribute":"mask_pattern

3.1.6. Example/verbatim enhancements

The verbatim and example filters now support a listitem attribute (ala the table filter), although this attribute currently only indents the text for these filters.

The skipheader attribute of the example and verbatim filters now uses the lang attribute, if any, to determine the commenting conventions. Previously, it assumed comments began with # and were terminated by the end of line.

3.1.7. Miscellaneous things

A module with support for Use Cases has been added (stdlib/usecases.sdm).

The insert macro can now be used to insert/execute a macro which may not be defined.

3.2. Fixes

sdftest on Windows/DOS systems now works.

For plain text output, unwanted lines between consecutive example paragraphs have been removed.

File handling on the Macintosh should now be fixed. (Thanks to David Schooley.)

Within sdfget reports, * processing now works again.

When generating an rtf file via FrameMaker, the intermediate mif file is now deleted.

Inner and Outer no longer produce warnings as unknown values for the align parameter for the table or box filter.

Consecutive normal paragraphs within a box filter or a multi-paragraph table cell no longer run together when HTML is generated.

The about filter works correctly again for HTML output.

The FILE phrase style is now mapped to TT for HTML output.

The OPT_PAGE_SIZE and OPT_WIDTH variables are no longer ignored if they are set via the init macro.

Generating PostScript and DVI via SGML-Tools 1.02 or later should now work.

Column alignments within tables are no longer ignored when SGML is generated.

None is now a legal value for cell rulings within tables. (Thanks to Cliff Krumvieda for this fix.)

3.3. Incompatibilities

Configuration files are now located differently. See Better packaging, above, for details.

The scripts in the bin directory now use /usr/local/bin/perl, rather than /usr/local/bin/perl5, i.e. the default version of Perl installed at a site is now assumed to be 5.003 or later.

The PDF and PostScript versions of the documentation are no longer shipped with the SDF package. Instead, the document catalog points to PDF and PostScript files on SDF's web site. (This change was made to reduce the size of the SDF distribution.)

If you are generating outputs via SGML-Tools, you now need SGML-Tools 1.02 or later (rather than 0.99 or later).

The paper document style now leaves headings as they are defined. Previously, it implicitly changed H-style headings to P-style headings and slid them down one level.

The sdtgen script has been renamed sdngen to reflect the fact that sdn is the extension now used for tuning modules.