Xiphos 3.1.2 "Christmas Eve"

XIPHOS RELEASE NOTES
____________________

Release 3.1.2
24 Dec 2009

Merry Christmas from the Xiphos development team.

This version of Xiphos is the final intermediate release prior to the
larger features planned for the forthcoming 3.2. This release
contains several interesting new features and enhancements, and (as
always) a number of bugfixes.

New features

 1. We have implemented a Xiphos-internal interface language selector,
   via Preferences -> General -> Options. This makes unnecessary
   most previous uses of difficult-to-understand environment
   variables to control the desired language choice. Choosing a new
   language requires a restart of Xiphos.

 2. Bookmarks are exportable. Select XML, HTML, or plaintext. For
   the latter two, select whether to include the text referenced.

 3. The StudyPad and personal commentary editor has gained a Link
   dialog, by which to arrange for verse reference linkage.

 4. Xiphos' main window navigation can be sampled and driven via
   external programs such as Bibledit, notably in support of Bible
   translators' work. (For developers, this uses the dbus feature.
   A test program to exercise this feature can be found in
   src/examples/ipc_client.py.)

 5. The Module Manager has a first-time-user introductory dialog,
   to offer brief explanation of its several parts. All users, even
   long-time users, will get it exactly once.

 6. CrossWire's module repository is forced as "current" after use of
   the Load Standard button, which updates Xiphos' sense of which
   repositories are officially recognized by CrossWire.

 7. Universal synchronization has been implemented between the main
   window and all detached windows, including embedded parallel tab.
   Navigating in any synchronized window makes all synchronized
   windows follow.

 8. The verse number color selector has been resurrected, erroneously
   removed in the early days of GnomeSword 2.2(!). (Why did we do
   that? Nobody remembers.)

 9. New interface translations: Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Chinese.
   (The last of these has been mechanically generated and is very,
   very rough at this time -- it will need human attention to gain
   acceptable quality.)

10. New icons for module lists; RtoL icons for use in Hebrew and Farsi.

Enhancements to existing behavior

 1. The Help->Chat interface has been improved by offering a default
   IRC nickname based on the user's login name.

 2. Huge improvements have been made to startup, search, and module
   manager setup times, due to internal refactoring of the usage of
   the Sword library.

 3. Icons have been added to all dialogs which lacked them.

 4. Hebrew searches have been improved.

 5. The verse annotation feature localizes verse references.

 6. The main window title follows currently-open modules better.

 7. Sidebar search has had improvements and fixes.

 8. Internal improvements for poorly-marked-up module content,
   including crash avoidance. Some module content is really
   dangerously bad.

 9. Improved passage export and printing.

10. Much work has been done for Windows with regard to our better
   display engine, but it is still not complete, and not present in
   today's Windows build for public distribution. To be done in 3.2.

11. Devotionals have been removed from Lookup Selection lists on the
   right-click context menu.

12. All locale-selection logic has been completely reworked.

13. Cosmetic improvements have been made to Module Manager's and main
   window's menus.

14. The Enter key is recognized for completion in bookmarks and user
   annotations.

15. Module archival in Module Manager no longer requires external
   program support.

16. Many dependencies on GNOME libraries have been removed. We are
   intending to completely de-GNOME Xiphos, in favor of reliance on
   GTK support alone.

Problems resolved

 1. An error in use of FTP repository registration was fixed.

 2. When doing searches, both sidebar and advanced, the "purplify"
   word-match facility has been rewritten from the ground up, and
   correctly identifies your search keywords.

 3. Tab names do not show the commentary when the general book is
   displayed instead.

 4. A focus-and-select bug was fixed, when deleting one interface tab.

 5. Corrections were made to text justification handling for RtoL
   (right-to-left) languages (Hebrew, Farsi).

 6. Minor adjustments to display have been made due to subtle
   differences in text markup variety (ThML -vs- OSIS).

 7. A crash induced by dictionary usage with none installed was fixed.

Improvements and helps for developers

   - Function prototypes are enforced.
   - The debug build of Xiphos includes substantial null pointer
     detection in the use of certain common string functions.
   - The ImageMagick dependency is gone, replaced with GTK functions.
   - --enable-silent-rules leads to far less chatty output during
     build. Get noisy output temporarily with "V=1 make".
   - File, URL, and Help invocations are now very general and use
     uniform underlying library support.
   - XPCOM_GLUE dependency errors have been fixed.
   - Timers have been implemented to show SWMgr creation delays.
   - Many, many updates to the build system and the Windows installer.

Bug reports addressed since 3.1.1:
2908987 crash detected in xiphos-3.1.1-1.fc12
2896427 Isa 49:6 in HunKar text
2893828 Malachi 4:6 in Aleppo text
2878951 KJV Stongs lexicon stops at 5624 (ophelimos)
2873367 Advanced Search results: Hotkey(s) to display Preview
2873362 Hotkey for activating simple searches not working
2872186 missing verses
2862814 Crash when compiled against xulrunner 1.9.1.3
2858494 Bible Window Does Not Automatically Display Selected Verse
2852779 delete source button enlarge sources list in twice
2849730 Lucene Text Fields search not working
2849693 Parallel view tab does not honour link tabs setting
2848320 Preview: Symboles for Footnotes
2844863 Lucene Search: Not finding all results
2841441 per verse annotation - localized reference

New feature requests pending:
2907492 Interlinear commentary
2902403 How to install for other than listed OS
2901374 Need for Serbian translation
2893826 Versification in the Psalms
2890364 Don't need to see strongs numbers, morphology
2873364 Highlight also upper case words
2873363 Shortcut/hotkey for simple/sidebar searches
2836740 Additional versification systems

Feature requests closed:
2871373 Increase number of texts in parallel view
2840134 Hide Verse Numbers in Copy/Export
2824127 Sidebar search: Regular expression?