Release: Xdata 4.4 for QuarkXPress 9/10

April 29, 2014 by car

This release of Xdata adds support for QuarkXPress 10 (Windows only, for the moment), discontinues support for QuarkXPress 8, and includes a number of improvements.

Changes

• Adds support for QuarkXPress 10 (Windows only, for now). The QuarkXPress 10 XTension requires a valid Xdata 10-level license. Please contact our sales department to purchase an upgrade license or to obtain a free upgrade if you purchased Xdata within the last six months.
• Removes support for QuarkXPress 8. Download links for Xdata 4.3.4, the final version for QuarkXPress 8, can be found in the side-bar on the Xdata 4.3.4 Release page. While we will no longer fix problems in or add features to this older version, we will continue to support the people using it.
• Adds replace(expr1, pattern, expr2), which replaces the first occurrence of pattern in expr1 with expr2. Pattern is case-sensitive.
• Adds replace(expr1, n, m, expr2), which replaces a range of characters, from n through m, within expr1 with expr2. This function can be used in conjunction with offset() to search and replace using a case-insensitive pattern.
• Adds replaceAll(expr1, pattern, expr2), which replaces all occurrences of pattern in expr1 with expr2. Pattern is case-sensitive.
• Adds offset(pattern, expression, from) variant, which searches for pattern within expression starting at character position from. As with the original offset() function, pattern is case-insensitive.
• Adds boxinfo(4), which returns the name (scripting label) of the current box.

• Adds an encoding parameter to the filecontents() function. The filecontents() function has always required that the text file being read be stored as the current OS’s native 8-bit text encoding (either MacRoman in OS X or WinLatin in Windows). UTF-8 was supported too, but required the use of a byte-order-mark (BOM) prefix on the file for it to be read properly.

  Now, the file’s encoding may be specified as a second parameter to filecontents(), like

  filecontents(path, encoding)

  where encoding is one of "win", "mac", or "unicode" (or "w", "m", or "u" for short). If no encoding is provided, filecontents() defaults to its old behavior as described above.

• Adds a non-centering Size to Fit w/o Distortion option to Preferences > General > Default picture position. Also adds aspectratiofitleft for use in prototypes, as in «set picpos to aspectratiofitleft».
• Adds a Pause and show import speed at end of import checkbox to the General Preferences dialog so that the traditional pause at the end of an import can be disabled. The pause is enabled by default.
• Re-labels the option that was called I’m an expert user as Suppress warnings when imported text is overset, which better describes what the option actually does.
• Adds .mer as a valid snapshot file extension to better support FileMaker Pro 12.
• Improves imports by falling back to the OS’s native 8-bit encoding if Unicode was selected as the import’s encoding but treating the imported text as UTF-8 would cause a decoding error.
• Fixes a problem where text pasted from the clipboard could end up with an extra CR (carriage return). (Windows only)