This topic contains the release notes that document the new features, improvements and bug fixes that were included in the various releases of Q++Studio in 2003.
See also: release notes of the current year and release notes of other years.
December 15, 2003 (build 10515)
New and Improved
•The new Year Offset Minicalendar Modifier can be used to easily display minicalendars of past and future years.
•In MonthHeader options, you can now compare the month of a (presumably) different date system on the first and last day of a month. This is useful, for example if you have a Gregorian dates monthly layout where you want to show the Chinese month corresponding to the date of the first of the month, and the Chinese month corresponding to the last day of the month.
•Added an appendix to the documentation that contains a complete table of ASCII characters that can be used within any Windows program, and in particular with a ASCII character tokens.
•Added more progress information when evaluating the tokens of a grid that contains GenTokens, otherwise the generation progress would seems to be stopped (only "seem") during the deep recursion entailed in the processing of GenTokens.
•The new Quark Files Comparer can be used to compare 2 QuarkXPress files in the most minute details. The QuarkXPress Files Comparer will spot a difference of 1/10th of a point in font size, or in baseline shift, or any other attributes, in a single word in a 300 page document. Textbox and other objects' positions can also be compared. This can be used to compare the results of 2 separate diary generations, or even to compare QuarkXPress files that were never generated using Q++Studio.
•Improved the message that you get when holidays symbols are filtered (or use the no duplicates option) and some duplicated symbols are eliminated. Previously you would get a cannot find token message, but now you are informed about the elimination in a less alarming way and with more details as to the context so that you can decide whether to ignore the message or not. See also related entry, below, in the Fixed and Corrected section.
•You can now specify that one or more of the aeiou-Holidays sets' dates should be ignored after a certain date. This is useful when all the holidays of a certain list are subject to official proclamation.
•Removed the limit of 25 characters for the text/tokens to be placed to the left and right of individual holidays in the Multiple Holidays Options.
•You can now specify the color to use for text and/or the textbox background within a macro, using 3 new nResult actions. This makes it easy to select a different color every month within a single macro.
•Added new Minicalendar Modifiers which make it easier to combine minicalendars of different structure within the same grid: Outside Days Visibility Override, Vertical Override, Horizontal Override, 5-Week Override and 6-Week Override. More of these can be added if there are any requests.
•Underscores in holidays abbreviations are now also converted to non-breaking spaces.
•Added 2 types of GenTokens conditions: day before holiday, and day after holiday. These are useful when you wish dates that contain holidays to be bounded by specially formatted rules above and below.
•First test version of the QuarkXPress 6 xtension. Contact us if you want to test it.
•New splash screen compliments of www.shockstream.com.
•The number of available MonthHeader and GenTokensoptions have been increased from 6 to 8.
•When the Length of Rules is set to Text (as opposed to Indents) then the Q++Studio interface now accepts negative values for both the From Left and the From Right settings. This follows the behaviour of the corresponding options tab in QuarkXPress (with the difference that Q++Studio does not know the dimensions of the textbox and therefore cannot warn you if the From Left or From Right value is too large, positively or negatively).
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a problem whereby the determination of which dates were outside the month would be incorrect, in a GenTokens token embedded in a Minicalendar tokenin a yearly grid. Only yearly grids were affected, and there was an easy workaround; un-checking the blank lines on outside days option.
•Fixed the problem that Q++Studio was having differentiating users at a same site if more than one user had the same c:\ hard drive serial number (this often happens if you buy more than one PC at the time, of the same model, from Dell).
•The extra tabs added at the end of one-line special tabulations used in minicals for cases when tab spacing or position depended on the number of days in the month, have been spaced out more as QuarkXPress was treating them all as the same tab stop.
•Fixed a minor glitch in the measurements editor whereby the value currently specified in the editor would not be saved if the control was on a PageControl with tabs and the tab was changed while the editor still had the focus (ie. the Enter key had not been pressed since the last time a value was modified in the editor).
•Fixed a rare issue that arose when holidays symbols were filtered (or used the no duplicates option) and additionally a macro was used to resize a group of holidays symbols. Then a cannot find token message was generated and using multi-pass did not solve the problem as it usually does.
•Fixed a bug that could cause Q++Studio to go into an infinite loop if you used a holidays symbol token and a holiday occurring on December 31st, with a non-blank symbol, was the very last holiday added to the holidays database by any of the users.
November 12, 2003 (build 10458)
New and Improved
•Improved the missing arbitrary dates report that is displayed following the message that some of the holidays sets used in the current script contain arbitrary dates rules holidays whose dates have not been set for a given year. The report now only displays the missing dates of the holidays set referred to in the message, and the missing dates are arranged in chronological order so you can address all the missing dates of a given year more conveniently.
•Added a new Holidays Display option for holidays symbols: No Duplicates. This option lets you specify that duplicated holidays symbols should be removed from the result of a holidays symbols token, without the extra effort of specifying a holidays symbols filter.
•Q++Studio now calculates a whole range of planetary events using state of the art data. For the moment the data can be exported, but no tokens have been defined to display them. These tokens will be implemented as they are requested by users.
•Saras execution has been improved significantly. Most importantly, the speed of execution of any Saras Set that contains more than one Sara is now less than half what it was before. Also, you are now notified if a Sara has removed (or added) a text overflow to your generated diary.
•You are now notified of the occurrence of text overflows as they occur, and not just at the end of diary generation, as was the case before.
•A new token [BoxFit] lets you specify that the textbox that contains it should grow in any or all directions, by a given number of points, until text overflow disappears.
•Usually, lists of Saints do not change from one year to the next, but if required you can now specify that one set be used until a given year and another set be used from that year onward. For example, you might want to use one set for all days before 2005 and another set for all dates from 2005 onwards.
•All the colors that are defined in any of the GridTemplates that make up a script are now available to be used in the output file. Previously, only colors that were actually used in one of the GridTemplates could be used in the output file, and any attempt to use them would cause QuarkXPress to generate an error message.
•The measurement editors for Line Endings Formatting and for One-Line-Minicalendars Tabulations now work the same way as in QuarkXPress. This means that you can now type in 2mm + 0,5pt/2 and the edit control will automatically convert it to the corresponding value in mm or pt, depending on the default units used. Also, the units can now be in inches, if the current script's Size Units property is set to inches.
•Design-time messages that refer to either [MonthHeader] or [GenTokens] options now open up to the appropriate tab in the GridOptions property editor. This was never a problem of time spent changing to the proper tab, but sometimes, when in a hurry, one would mistakenly change settings for [GenTokens1] instead of [GenTokens4], for example, which had been the cause of the message in the first place.
•The script lines Copy from feature has been improved. You can now replace the currently selected scriptline in a script by any scriptline of the same type in another script. Previously you could only insert a scriptline from another script under the currently selected scriptline (this option is still available).
•Removed the restriction that prevented you from listing generation messages while QuarkXPress was open. The restriction is now limited to the case when you are viewing messages of an output file only.
•The Find Holiday (or Find Holidays Set) dialog now remembers the most recent settings you have used, so that you can, for example, modify all holidays whose name contains "Boxing", without having to reselect the option to search for text and the text to search for.
•Most of the special character markers can now also be used with QuarkXPress 3.3 (previously special character markers such as non-breaking spaces would only work with QuarkXPress 4 and above). The only remaining special character token that does not work with QuarkXPress 3.3 is the Right Indent Tab.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a problem that occurred with the setting of baseline shift values, either in macro actions or in Saras, whereby the resulting baseline shift would be rounded to the nearest integer. The same issue also occasionally occurred for horizontal and vertical scale and shade, but since those attributes are usually specified in integer percentage values, it was never noticed by any user.
•Fixed the sometimes erroneous occurrence of the message that would ask you to upgrade the "None" moon data source, when you had not selected any moon data source.
•Fixed a minor bug whereby the use of a French saint with its prefix (S with a superscript e) inside a GenTokens string would not be converted properly. Also fixed the erroneous appearance of a message that the "e" used in French saints prefixes could not be replaced. This was due to a call to the function that makes the French saint prefix superscript, even when the prefix was not included in a saint token such as [:st_ä].
•Corrected the help topic documenting the macro function MoonPhaseOf. The help topic, as it was previously written was misleading and could lead you to write a macro that was supposed to check if there was a moon phase on a given date, but actually always returned true (as if there was a moon phase every day).
•Fixed a bug that caused yearly grids that started on the week of January 1st to revert to starting on January 1st whenever you changed their begin rule. This inadvertent change was corrected whenever you saved and closed the script and did not re-appear unless you modified the begin rule again, something that is rarely done for yearly grids (probably why nobody noticed this bug before).
•Fixed an issue that occurred with the non-breaking space special character token, whereby some face attributes (baseline shift, font size) and paragraph attributes (leading) would revert to their default values as specified in the Normal style sheet.
•In some very rare cases, the message Rule corresponding to generated holiday cannot be found would be displayed as an exception rather than a message. Specifically this would occur when a script's Filter Holidays property was set to false, and some holidays rules had been deleted without holidays being re-generated, and those deleted rules were used by the current script. This rarely seen user interface ugliness has now been fixed.
•Fixed a bug whereby the w# week number minicalendar marker would be displayed using the current week attributes rather than the fully outside week attributes, in the case of an absoluteminicalendar where the last, fully outside, week of the minicalendar corresponded to the week of the last day of the grid.
•Previously, the One-Line Minical Tabulations options would only apply the the first language weekday names. Now they apply to weekdays of up to 10 different languages at the same time.
•Fixed a bug whereby GenTokens options would not be saved if the line of text/tokens to be repeated was blank. This was done to speed up the loading of scripts, since reading the many possible GenTokens options is very long, even if no options are set, unless the options are simply not saved (this was the idea behind the optimization that caused this bug). This problem would rarely have been noticed, since most uses of GenTokens specify some text/tokens to be repeated, but in the case of shading for a one-line minicalendar, then this bug would surface.
October 9, 2003 (build 10402)
New and Improved
•Major new feature: you can now specify that one-line minicalendarsshould use a different set of tabulations depending on whether the month has 28, 29, 30 or 31 days and also allowing for different tabulation separation between different weekdays (for example, Sundays and Mondays).
•Added new MonthHeader options and re-did the user interface. You now have up to 6 possible sets of options, yet the property editor opens up faster and the property loads and saves much faster.
•The underscore character ("_" without the quotes) is now automatically converted to a non-breaking space if used in the following text fields: holiday name, symbol/holiday separator, left/right holidays wrapper, saints names, namedays names, slogans text and concatenated holidays text. This new feature should be a great help in getting better control over the placement of line ending for multi line text.
•You can now specify font formatting, including hiding, for minicalendar week numbers that correspond to fully outside weeks, independently of the fully outside week setting used for outside dates.
•Improved the textual display of font formatting in the Minicalendars Options dialog; particularly, now the selected color, if any, is displayed by name rather than by CMYK values as it was previously.
Fixed and Corrected
•Some of the special character markers, such as right indent tabs, would only work if you used QuarkXPress 4.10 or later (ie. it would not work with QuarkXPress 4.00, 4.01 or 4.04). This is now fixed.
•Fixed a bug whereby some properties' options (such as GenTokens and MonthHeaders) would not be properly copied over when copying a scriptline in the scripts editor.
•Fixed a glitch in the Saras Editor whereby it would be difficult to edit some of the numerical values with the keyboard because Q++Studio tried to validate your entry before you had time to type it entirely (for example, in the horizontal scale field, if you typed 8, Q++Studio would correct it to the minimum value of 25, before you had a chance to type the following 0 that would make an acceptable value of 80).
•Fixed a glitch in the Distances Manager whereby changing the displayed units from miles to kilometers would immediately update the great circle distances, but would not update the rhumb line distances until the entry was saved. This was only a user interface problem; the distances in the generated diary were calculated correctly.
September 17, 2003 (build 10356)
New and Improved
•Major new feature: the GenTokens options have been expanded to allow you to specify paragraph formatting on a line-per-line basis, according to a number of special conditions. Now, with only a few mouse clicks, you can specify that a monthly diary should be shaded with a line under on Sundays and shaded only on Saturdays and holidays, excepted Sundays, etc... To specify the paragraph formatting you can use Xtags text, or you can use the new dialog which reproduces all the options of the QuarkXPress Formats dialog.
•You can now use distance tokens to build information pages that display charts of city-to-city distances. You can have Q++Studio automatically calculate the great circle or rhumb line distances, or you can use actual driving distances saved in the shared distances database.
•The concept of the current week in duration tokens now takes into account the weekstart setting used in the parent DiaryGridLine.
•When you select a new output filename manually, you are now brought directly to a directory that is consistent with the settings of your Execution Preferences.
•Added a new way of defining Dawn and Dusk: exactly X minutes before/after. This can be used to display the beginning and end of hours of darkness, when headlights should be turned on.
•Added the possibility of adding all the holidays sets contained in a folder to the list of selected holidays sets in the Holidays Export and Holidays Overridedialogs.
•Improved the way Front Pages and Back Pages scriptlines are disabled. Previously the line itself would be disabled meaning that you could not re-enable some of its child lines individually. Now disabling these 2 scriptlines disables all its child lines, but not the line itself, meaning that you can disable all lines in the front and then re-enable one or more of these lines.
•Data Contributors can now access and modify their User Preferences.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a glitch in the Slogans Manager whereby a change in the Display Font of the current set would not be applied immediately to the currently displayed slogan (you had to re-select it for the font change to be visible).
•Fixed a bug that allowed a user to specify a Fixed Day value larger than the number of days in a month, in the GenTokens options.
•Fixed a glitch in the Diary Generation Messages List Dialog whereby some accented characters contained in messages would not be displayed correctly (this only applied to run-time messages, the output file was not affected).
•Fixed an incorrect appearance of the message Q++Studio Xtension is Missing that would occur after opening the internal Quark.
•Fixed a bug in the export of deprecated moon phases, whereby the Excel sheet produced would be empty.
•Fixed a user interface glitch whereby the Multi-Step property would appear as part of the wrong script line, if the Output Type property was exited.
August 12, 2003 (build 10278)
New and Improved
•The popup hint that appears above a sample dates in the Holidays Manager now remain visible until you move your cursor away from them. This is useful to keep the expanded date visible while referring to a document.
•The calculation and display of Muslim Prayer Times are now fully implemented.
•You can now display 1/8th moon phases (waxing crescent, waxing gibbous, waning gibbous and waning crescent). Additional options have been added to ensure that 1/8 phases do not appear if you do not wish to display them.
•A whole series of new tokens have been implemented to display special Quark characters such as nonbreaking spaces (normal, em, en and punctuation), em- and en-dashes, and tokens to move from one column or linked textbox to the next. You can also use these to specify ASCII characters by their number to display characters such as opening and closing, single and double, quotes.
•Added tokens to display Summer Time, either only on dates when it changes, or on any date.
•Added a message to alert you to the occurrence of duplicate tokens in a GridTemplate. Usually this can be an indication that the tokens for DayValue 1 were copied and pasted to other DayValues, but that you forgot to change some of the DayValues for the other days. Additionally, if there are some tokens that are duplicated with good reason, you can specify that these tokens should be allowed to be duplicated. This has the advantage that you only get this message for potential problems, and not for valid tokens.
•Improved the process on scanning a new Template in response to a message that no Template is Selected. Previously, once you had specified the Template's properties, you would be asked if you wanted to use the newly scanned template for the current DiaryGridLine. This became tiresome as users would click Yes to that question 99% of the time. Therefore, now an additional checkbox (checked by default) appears in the Template properties dialog box allowing you to save the scan and specify that it should be used for the currently selected DiaryGridLine, with only one click.
•Improved the speed with which the Select City dialog would come up, particularly on slow networks.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a rare bug that occurred if you were displaying a holiday abbreviation token with a list of many holiday occurrences that did not have an abbreviation specified, and you had not specified any sorting settings.
July 8, 2003 (build 10202)
New and Improved
•(major new feature) You can now insert Xpress Tags in various parts of Q++Studio. For example you can specify that the result of a Macro token should use Xtags, and you can specify Xtags to use to display 23/30 and 24/31 characters in minicalendars.
•The new [GenTokens] can be used to generate the most complicated monthly diaries from a single monthly token, without the need to use macros. All the lines of tokens are generated and their DayValues automatically updated. These lines of tokens can also include any macro tokens.
•There is a completely new topic in the documentation that lists tips on making your Saras execute faster. If you have some scripts that are being slowed down by Saras, make sure that you read this new topic.
•You can now display information about many different Moon Data Sources and Sun Data Sources, in the same script. This is useful to build tables of sunrise/sunset and moonrise/moonset for many locations.
•You can now automatically calculate and display the dates and times of seasons, solstices and equinoxes, and Zodiac signs.
•Added an option to allow you to specify how the number 4 should be displayed using Roman numerals (although the proper way of displaying a 4 in Roman numerals is IV, one sometimes sees the use of IIII instead).
•Improved the behavior of the Holidays Explorer when changing the selected holidays set in the TreeView to the left. Previously a change in the selected holidays set would reset the filter to only filter based on the selected holidays set (any additional filter conditions, such as "Month = 12" would be dropped).
•The calculation of Moon Transits has been improved by adding a correction that takes into account the variable parallax of the Moon. This is particularly important at high latitudes (over 55 degrees).
•The online CHM and PDF documentation has been revised and improved. In particular, all the topics of the Messages, Administration and Appendiceschapters have now been revised and expanded.
•All the data export to Excel has been re-written so that you do not need to have Excel installed on your workstation to be able to create Excel files. This method is also more stable, as some users' workstations had problems communicating with Excel via OLE.
•You can now Sara text that contains different runs of attributes and only change some of the attributes without disturbing other attributes (previously all text would be overwritten with the attributes of the first character of the search text).
•A new script property Quark Format lets you force QuarkXPress to save the output file of a diary generation as QuarkXPress's single-language or multiple language. This is sometimes necessary when QuarkXPress incorrectly tries to save an output file as a single-language file and hence cause the output file saving to be interrupted by a dialog asking you to select a unique single language.
•The Master Pages property has been augmented to allow you to keep the names and letter of Quark master pages in the document layout window. You still should not place any tokens in the master pages, but at least the document layout shows all the correct master pages.
•A new message warns you that, for Cyclical and Run-Once Slogans Sets, the slogans displayed in the Script Preview may not be accurate, and tells you how to make sure that it is, if you need accurate preview of these types of Slogans.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug whereby any special treatment specified for Muslim holidays that occurred on either of a Friday, Saturday or Sunday would not be properly saved.
•Fixed an error message that would occur when exporting Saints, Namedays or One-Time-Dates, if the length of any entry was longer than 255 characters. This was a user interface bug in the way that Excel handles column auto-size and the fix protects the user from this limitation.
June 17, 2003 (build 10136)
New and Improved
•You can now easily convert Slogans Sets from Day and Month to Specific Dates and vice-versa using the new More menu button in the Slogans Manager.
•You can now use Padded Tokens to display the result of any token with everyone of its characters separated from the others by one or more characters. For example, this allows you to display elements such as 2.0.0.4 (using a dot as padding character) or month names vertically (using a return, &s, as padding characters).
•Improved the speed of conversion of macro tokens when the resulting actions are set to Delete, Group Delete or Change to Picturebox.
•Added a warning if a script's output file is saved on a local drive (you can then choose to move the location of the output file and Q++Studio will automatically update all internal links to it).
•Added a completely rewritten installation chapter to guide you step-by-step if you ever need to re-install the server or a workstation or to add a new user at your site. This chapter also includes links to the Q++Studio Web Site so that you can download any of the installation files that you may be missing. With this new chapter and download links, you should be able to re-install Q++Studio (server and/or workstation) from scratch.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a minor user interface bug whereby the Hol1 checkbox would always be checked when editing the Contents of DayHeaders options of minicalendars.
•Fixed a bug whereby the Any date in spread matches Minical month option would be triggered incorrectly if a page contained DayValues that did not belong to that page (for example a DayValue of 1 in a page where all tokens are based on DayValue 5).
May 19, 2003 (build 10078)
New and Improved
•Added calculated moon phases for any time zone, including summer time effects.
•You can now display Jewish Events and Muslim Events. Q++Studio calculates these times automatically using all the various conventions followed by the different religious schools of both of these religions.
•The interface used to specify Muslim Calendars and Dates has been greatly improved so that you do not have to validate changes at every year change, but only when changing from one calendar to the other.
•(long awaited) You can now copy script lines from one Script to another, using the new Copy from functionality.
•Read the new topic for tips on how to make GridTemplate Scanning and Diary Generation faster.
•A new feature, the Technical Support Availability, opens a web page for you, so that you may get an indication of how soon you can expect a response to your technical support emails.
•You can now display moon phases in the calendar of the main window.
April 22, 2003 (build 10020)
New and Improved
•A new feature, the Holidays Explorer, lets you analyze generated holidays in every conceivable manner: sorting, filtering, grouping, and you can also export these results in MS-Excel format.
•The remote debugging has been improved to trace the location of applications errors in the source code, even if the error occurs before the main window is created. This is particularly useful in the rare cases when a database parametrization error occurs on application start-up.
•The Q++Manual in PDF format has been improved. The headers and titles in the body of the text are now dissociated from the titles in the table of contents that appears in the TreeView on the left. This means that the table of contents can remain terse, because sub-topics are seen in the context of their parent topic, but the topic headers in the body of the text, which are often the only header on a page, can be more verbose so that the context of each topic header is easier to understand.
•The Moon Text can now be 75 characters. Previously it was limited to 20 characters.
•You can now specify Sikh Holidays.
•You can now display Sun Data (dawn, sunrise, sunset, dusk) using a variety of Sun Tokens. You can specify latitude, longitude, timezone, summer time rules, elevation above sea level and which method to use in the calculation of dawn and dusk which can be used to calculate religious times such as the Muslim Asr, or the Jewish end of Shabbath times.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug whereby the 23/30 and 24/31 combined characters of Minicalendar Options were the same for both cases, if you used the "courier-style" display option.
March 24, 2003 (build 9950)
New and Improved
•Q++Studio now verifies if the size chosen for a diary is larger than the largest Quark File physical size.
•Added a new MiniCalendar Option: w# on every date. This is useful when you want to display week numbers in one-line-minicalendars that do not start at the beginning of the week (as opposed to the first of the month, for example).
•Improved the display of the Scripts Explorer when it appears. Previously the entire scripts folder hierarchy was fully expanded which meant that it was hard to navigate the hierarchy if you had many different folders and sub-folders. Now, all branches of the folders tree are collapsed, except the branch of the most-recently used folder.
•You can now display days, weekdays, week numbers, quarters and years using Roman Numerals.
•Added a new Holidays Display option: Do not split individual holidays' Abbreviations. This option is useful if you are using the the [fâ]..[fû] tokens to display holiday abbreviations that contain full country names such as Hong Kong and United States that can be made up of more than one word (as opposed to using abbreviations such as HKG and USA). In those cases, if you tried to apply a filter to the output, the individual names would be sorted unpredictably. This new option ensures that country names used in holidays abbreviations are kept together.
•When exporting recurring holidays to excel, any exceptions to a ruleare now clearly indicated in the exported file.
•If QuarkXPress crashes during diary generation, the progress dialog now offers a direct link to the help topic that discusses the various cases and possible solutions.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug whereby the Add/subtract Days settings used for Muslim holidays would not be saved properly (this did not affect any other type of holidays rules).
March 10, 2003 (build 9929)
New and Improved
•You can now display MonthHeaders using rich-text formatting (bold, italic, font size, ...).
•When exporting recurring holidays, holidays that occur more than once in a given Gregorian year are now displayed on a second line (previously, only the first date was displayed).
•Buddhist holidays based on the Tibetan calendar can now be calculated automatically. Work is under way to implement Buddhist holidays for the 2 other Buddhist variants: Theravada and Zen.
•Added more options for special cases of fixed date, Muslim and Chinese holidays recurrence rules.
•A new minicalendar modifier was added :rtl which allows you to mix right-to-left and left-to-right minicalendars on the same page.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a warning that would appear incorrectly if you included tokens with non default formatting elsewhere than on the first line of a Slogan.
•Fixed a bug in the page calculation for daily diaries grids that contain more than 2 pages but also contain dates that are spread over 2 pages (7d/12p for example). In these cases the page calculation would stop on the left page of the diary finishing date, without taking into account that the right page also contained the same date.
February 24, 2003 (build 9912)
New and Improved
•The calculation of sample dates in the Holidays Manager and the Holidays Rules Wizard has been speeded up by a factor of 3. For most types of holidays this is not noticeable, but it becomes noticeable for Chinese Lunar holidays, and most particularly for Hindu Lunar and Tibetan holidays (under construction).
•The window that displays diary generation messages has been improved. It now remembers the most recent generation, even if Q++Studio was closed in the meantime, and it also displays a help preview automatically, for every message selected.
•Holidays tokens can now be used with Specific Holidays Sets Modifier which allow you to specify which of the Holidays Sets in a Holidays List you wish to refer to. This is useful when creating holidays pages where the holidays of many countries are listed on the same page for a year.
•A new token [GenRules] can be used to easily generate rules and shading in monthly planners.
•Improved the positioning of the cursor in the Macros Editor after using the F2, F3 or F4 keys to enter variables or functions from drop-down lists.
•Improved the messages generated when Q++Studio encounters an error in the condition of a zap token.
•The speed of token replacement using QuarkXPress 5 has been improved by a factor of 4.
February 11, 2003 (build 9881)
New and Improved
•All the Resulting Actions that are available for the case bResult=true are now also available for the case bResult=false. This will eliminate much of the need for recursive macro tokens.
•You do not need to open the Macros Editor to import macrosanymore; you can now do it from the Advanced menu of the Main Window.
•Added a new type of tokens: Year Offset Tokens. This is useful, for example if you wish to use a token to display the Copyright year of a diary, a year that is usually always before the year of the diary itself.
•Added messages that warn you if you are using MonthHeader Tokensbut have not specified any settingsfor these.
•The user-friendliness of the Macros Options property editor has been improved. Q++Studio does not need to close and reload the macro options when you change the settings of a macro that refers to other macros.
•Whenever Q++Studio needs to close QuarkXPress (before scanning and before generating a diary) Q++Studio now waits 3 seconds for QuarkXPress to close down before minimizing itself and displaying a message that QuarkXPress is waiting for a response from the user. This avoids screen flicker in the cases where QuarkXPress just needs a little bit longer to close down, but does not need input from the user.
•Data-contributors can now also send emails automatically to technical support.
• The Registration color is now purged out of scanned and available colors. This will occur as soon as any grid is rescanned.
•Added a message to warn you if one of the characters used in one of the Moon Options is one of the characters reserved for communication between Q++Studio and QuarkXPress (ie. []|{} ).
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug whereby some of the more recent options of the Holidays Display property would not be saved with your Preferences.
January 24, 2003 (build 9823)
New and Improved
•Made the rule if a fixed date holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday much more flexible. You can now move to any of the preceding or following weekdays. You can also specify that the holiday should not be moved but rather copied.
•The duration of any recurring holidays can now be based on any day, or days restricted to Mon-Fri or Mon-Sat.
•In the holidays manager, Muslim holidays are now displayed in the correct chronological order based on the current year. This change was made necessary because the Muslim calendar slides by an average of 11 days every year and therefore holidays that occurred in January one year may occur in December the following year.
•Improved (again) the messages generated if Q++Studio finds mismatched braces in a QuarkXPress file that it is scanning. Q++Studio now specifically identifies repeated opening and closing braces such as [[1d] or [1d]].
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug that allowed the creation of a leaf Slogans Set within a leaf Slogans Set.
January 20, 2003 (build 9808)
New and Improved
•Improved the property editor used to select Holidays Sets. You can now select the entire contents of a folder set, and remove a selection of many sets.
•You can now display a preview of each Script's Main Grid in the Scripts Explorer. This is useful when looking for a script, without having to open the script to see what the diary looks like.
•Holiday rules based on fixed dates can now also be based on the Orthodox calendar.
•Improved the Q++Studio Plain Text Editor. You can now choose the font and font size to use to display the text you are entering.
•Improved the calculation of new moons used in the Hindu calendar and for Hindu holidays.
•Added the possibility of exporting macros from within the Macros Options property editor.
•Added the possibility for users to generate logs, warnings and even their own errors using the new macro functions: Assert, LogMessage and RaiseError.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a minor interface glitch whereby selecting any Included Macro in the range 10-19 or 20-29 would also automatically include the macros of index 1 and 2 respectively. This interface glitch had no adverse side effect.
January 6, 2003 (build 9778)
New and Improved
•You can now have language-dependent tokens in Holidays Sets that are used in Concatenated Holidays.
•Added a new option to minicalendars formatting: the possibility of appending or prepended text to the number that appear for any date.
•Overhaul of the code that draws the CheckBox and RadioGroup components. This makes it easier to see which options are selected, particularly when these controls are disabled. The same has also been done for the PageControls (such as the tools tabs).
•The token preview of the Tokens Data Pump now displays the tokens using the Display Font of the selected Language.
•You can now have Q++Studio automatically re-inspect all the Quark Pages of the current script.
•Added an option to Purge Concatenated Holidays. This allows you to keep the database of concatenated holidays small by purging concatenated dates that will not be used anymore.
•Improved the previewing of GridTemplates and Quark Pages: pages are now displayed 2 by 2, as they would in QuarkXPress, and in the case of Quark Pages, pages that are not part of the current scriptline's page selection are clearly identified.
•The Email Technical Support now splits emails up so that no individual message ever exceeds 1.5MB in size. This ensures that your messages are not rejected by your email server. Also, the files attached now specifically only select the files that are appropriate to the value of the Output Type property of the script that was open when you launched the email technical support.
•Added new macros system variables that provide convenient shortcuts to often used expression: n_TokenDay, nTokenWeekday, n_TokenMonth and n_TokenYear.
•You can now hide design-time messages selectively, even if you are not the administrator, and manage the selection of hidden messages in the Messages Preferences.
•Improved the Minical Options property editor. Previously, if you clicked on the Use Defaults button the change was immediate (ie. even if you then pressed Cancel, the change was still made). This is now changed so that clicking on the Use Defaults button can be canceled as can all other settings of that dialog.
•Improved the user interface of the Sara Engine to make the allowable choices more obvious. The help topics corresponding to various modal messages have also been expanded and improved.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug that surfaced when setting the Start Splittable Grid On GridOption to left page; the grid would start on the firdst available page, ignoring the left page setting. This problem only occurred in the specific cases of weekly diaries that contained multiple number of weeks on each page. All other cases were unaffected.
•The token preview within the script preview now correctly displays fonts whose size is not an integer (such as 4.75pts).
•Fixed a bug whereby the Ignore Caps Capitalization Option would be ignored when converting Muslim months using the [iMmmm] and [iMMMM] tokens. This did not affect any other token.
•Fixed a bug whereby the option to match the beginning and end of weeks would not be saved to disk along with the other Begin/End Rules in the case of a daily grid.
•Fixed a glitch in the user interface of the Saras that prevented searching for 1/100th of a point font sizes (you could search for font size 5.3pt, for example, but not for 5.37pt).
Other Years
See also: release notes of the current year and release notes of other years.
Topic 174170, last updated on 14-Aug-2024
