Release: Xcatalog 6/7/8.3.3.2 for QuarkXPress 6/7/8

February 26, 2010 by cpr

This set of release notes covers the whole Xcatalog 6/7/8 series.

Important: versions prior to 6/7/8.3.2 will not recognize or display links created in 6/7/8.3.2 (or later) due to the addition of full Unicode support in the 6/7/8.3.2 release. This means that if one person updates from 6/7/8.3.1 (or older), everyone with whom they share documents will need to update their copy of Xcatalog as well.

Changes at 6/7/8.3.3.2 release

• Fixed a problem introduced in 6/7/8.3.2 where updating a link with an empty field with Xcatalog’s “enhanced link editability” preference enabled would corrupt the link or cause it to disappear.
• At-signs (@) appearing in, for example, e-mail addresses within the body of a paragraph of an XPress Tagged field are no longer treated specially, so long as there is an end-of-paragraph or some other tag-like character between it and the next (if any) colon (:). Meaning, so long as an @ doesn’t look like a paragraph style reference, it will not be treated as one.
• For Windows 7, Vista and XP users with administrative privileges, the plug-in’s registration information is once again stored in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Em Software, where it will be available for all users of the machine. Registration information for users lacking administrative privileges remains in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Em
Software where it will be available only to that user.

Changes at 6/7/8.3.3.1 release

• Worked around a Mac-only problem where some ODBC drivers were overwriting memory, causing the loss of characters in large updates and general instabilities that could lead to crashes. (Mac OS X)
• Fixed a problem where updates from FileMaker Online would, on some systems, include a leading garbage character.
• Fixed a problem in QuarkXPress 8 where the missing picture’s proxy image, the big red question mark, wasn’t being scaled properly to fit its box.
• Fixed a problem where the filenames of placed missing pictures could sometimes show up in QuarkXPress 8’s Picture Usage dialog with trailing garbage characters.
• Changed the handling of missing pictures in QuarkXPress 8 because references to missing pictures were sometimes being lost and displayed as “No Disk File” in the Utilities > Usage > Pictures dialog. In versions prior to QuarkXPress 8, a reference to a missing picture was always retained exactly as it was specified. Now, on Mac OS, a full path to a missing picture (“Macintosh HD:Users:me:Pictures:cat.jpg”, for example) is retained only if each folder in the path actually exists. If any folder of a full path is missing, or the missing picture is specified with a partial path (like “cat.jpg” or “:Pictures:cat.jpg”), then just the picture’s filename (“cat.jpg”) is retained as being relative to either the current document, if the document has ever been saved, or the user’s home folder. On Windows, a full path to a missing picture is always retained. Partial/relative paths to missing pictures are retained as being relative to either the current document, if the document has ever been saved, or the user’s home folder.

Changes at 6/7/8.3.3 release

• Folded all Pro features, which previously lived in a separate Pro binary, into the primary Xcatalog XTension. Pro-ness (meaning ODBC support) is now automatically enabled when the product is activated with a “Pro” serial number. No changes to existing installations should be necessary: if you have a Pro serial number and you replace an older Xcatalog Pro XTension with this latest Xcatalog XTension, you will still have access to all Pro features. (The Xcatalog > About dialog will display “[Pro]” after your serial number.)
• Added direct support for QuarkXPress tables. Tags on text within table cells as well as tags on individual table cells may now be created, edited and updated.
• Added a simple, Pro-only facility for prefixing Xcatalog-generated WHERE clauses with arbitrary predicates. These prefix predicates may be specified for individual fields using the DD’s new V”…” qualifier. Any prefix specified for a key field is applied to all fields. Prefix predicates are always combined with the generated predicate using AND. For example, the DD

  SKU[K D"foo" V"STATE='NY'"] description[T]

  would generate an SQL update statement like

  SELECT description FROM foo WHERE STATE='NY' AND SKU='12345'

  This feature is designed primarily to be used with scripting, where you can provide the DD contents with varying V contents to focus an update (in either direction) on a subset of the database (e.g., STATE = 'NY' or CATALOG_ID = 213).

• Fixed a problem with the “fill box maintaining aspect ratio” picture positioning setting where,
  when applied to rotated pictures, triangular areas of the box’s background would be left exposed.

Changes at 6/7/8.3.2 release

• Introduced a new “enhanced editability” mode in QuarkXPress 7+, which simplifies the editing of text links. Once enabled (via Xcatalog > Preferences > User Interface > Enhanced text link editability), any changed or updated link will include invisible, sacrificial “guard” characters (zero-width spaces) at either end of the link. Text can then be easily inserted at either end of the link without playing the editing games that are required when the brackets “stick” to the link’s content. The enhanced editability mode also allows for simpler editing of empty “placeholder” links, since, when enabled, the text cursor can be placed inside the empty link.Since the addition of these zero-width spaces may affect how Quark’s composer line-breaks existing links, the enhanced editability mode may be disabled on individual problem fields using the new Z qualifier in your DD file.
• Added full bi-directional support for Unicode data when communicating directly with FileMaker Pro 7 (or newer) from QuarkXPress 7 (or newer).
• Fixed a long-standing problem where some characters (mainly tabs and carriage returns) were being lost when updating a document using a direct FileMaker Pro connection.
• Fixed a long-standing problem which was causing record creation to always fail when communicating directly with FileMaker Pro 7 (or newer).
• Added Unicode support to the key, field name, DD name and price style name stored in links. Note that this change affects the storage format of links in all versions of QuarkXPress (even 6.x) and will require the use of Xtags 6/7/8.3.3 (or newer) to export links created or edited with this version of Xcatalog.

Changes at 6/7/8.3.1.1 release

• Added support for Mac OS X’s native ODBC Administrator. Use of OpenLink’s ODBC Administrator is no longer required. (Pro only)
• Removed support for the iODBC framework. Installation of the iODBC framework is no longer required for ODBC connectivity since Xcatalog Pro now supports Mac OS X’s native ODBC mechanism directly (see above). (Pro only) Note that DSNs created in OpenLink’s ODBC Administrator should continue to work properly without modification.
• Deprecated the DD’s “^” ODBC manager qualifier. Only the native Mac OS X ODBC Administrator is now supported. (Pro only)
• Dragging a library element out to a document with the tagger palette open no longer causes a crash.
• Importing and exporting long (greater than 63 character) key fields now works properly with snapshot files and no longer produces “key not found” errors.
• The tagger palette’s last position is now remembered after an application restart. (XPress 7+ only)
• Addressed an issue in Windows XP and Windows Vista where some users were being asked to reenter their serial number every time they launched QuarkXPress.

Changes at 6/7/8.3.1 release

• Added support for QuarkXPress 8.0.
• Added support for palette sets in QuarkXPress 7 and 8.
• Fixed a problem where the DD map menu could display incorrectly after the selection of a new DD file containing one or more maps than the previous DD file.
• Made with key updating scripting feature work again.
• Fixed a problem where an ODBC source/destination selection wouldn’t probably “stick” (stay selected) over QuarkXPress restarts.
• Fixed a problem with picture updates, where Xcatalog was bringing up an error dialog “The picture path ‘…’ is too long …”.
• Added a visual indicator (a big red question mark) to every picture box that is updated, but fails to load an image (i.e., when the linked picture can’t be found). Also added information to the affected picture box such that the Picture Usage dialog box can be used to later find and reload the missing picture.