NewView

NewView release changes V2.19.4 - Swedish translation added (Thanks to Björn Söderström) - Fix: NewView is now able to open really large help files (e.g. jdk14corba.inf with 11921536bytes). - Fix: In some situations the highlighting of the search results marks to many places in a topic.

NewView release changes V2.19 - the display of a bubble help at some places of the left panel is removed - the default of the option 'Show left panel for - Online help for applications' is changed to true. - new toolbar icon added for toggling the left panel - all toolbar icons replaced by now ones (copied form lucide) the order of the icons is changed - some problems with various cml line options fixed - global search in selected help path directories searches in all; fixed - starting 'newview -lang:en' produces some problems with translations e.g. in the global search dialog; fixed (#16) - some layout problems with the gloabal search dialog fixed (includes the fix for #15) - New command line parser The command line syntax is changed. Samples: newview cmdref copy newview /s cmdref copy newview /s cmdref "net access" newview /g cmdref help newview /g help - many fixes for links - other small fixes (see trac) - many changes for the debugging support - There was a blank at the beginning of a paragraph after a graphic; fixed - In some other situations there was a blank to much at the beginning of a paragraph; fixed - Version numbering changed - Menu entry 'Save as IPF' translated to german - many refactoring changes to remove unused source and add as many unit tests as possible yes we have (356) unit tests! (at the moment manly for the command line) - some backup files removed - ACLCtl10.DLL, ACLCtl10.h, ACLCtl10.pas, ACLCtl10.zip removed form my local build \components directory - Test.pas removed form my local build \components directory - fix for unused vars in sibyl\addon\gradient.pas - fix for unused vars in sibyl\addon\ScktComp.pas - fix for missing bitmap cool1.bmp in components

NewView release changes V1.15.2 - First draft of global search. It's pretty slow. Incomplete. - Fixed index duplicates. It's not quite perfect because if there is a topic with the same title but pointing to a different topic it will not be caught... - Added /profile cmd line option - Command line topic searching. Bit different to view. View searches the index and displays only the first topic. I decided to do a full text search and (of course) display all the results. This could be another option, I guess, but I think mine is more helpful. - Fixed many, many large memory leaks in help file loading. - While loading help file(s) show which file is being loaded in the status bar. - Fixed a huge bug in the navigation back and forward with multiple windows! - Load notes before displaying first topic. V1.13.2 - Fixed broken options screen - Colours can be customised - File dialog: - Option to use std OS/2 dialog, so that enhancers can replace. - Fix keyboard operation of directory list box - Default filter to only help files. - Fix copy - Fixed problems with link mouse over V1.12.19 - Fixed huge memory consumption and crash on files with one or more empty topics. - Fixed extra random data at end of topics. - Fixed crash following link in some cases. - Fixed the display of < and >. - Improved index reading - should not crash ;-) - Reset progress if file fails to load - Improved window painting while scrolling - FIxed bitmap/wrapping problems V1.12.14 First public release. NewView ------- Copyright 2000 Aaron Lawrence (aaronl@consultant.com) NewView is a replacement for... View.exe, the original naff OS/2 help viewer. Major enhancements are: New user interface (split window with contents always available) Select and copy direct from window. Including keyboard selection Remembers size & position Most recently used files list Smooth scrolling display Always see where in contents current doc is Loads file into memory instead of leaving it open Can go forward as well as back in history Various options (colours, fonts etc) Annotate help files - notes are displayed within topic Fully resizeable even with multi-windows More search options. Installation ------------ Unzip into a directory, which can be in the path if you want. NewView does not use any additional DLLs. The usual HELP and BOOKSHELF environment variables are used. Using NewView ------------- Basically the same as View. You can load files from the command line, or open them within the program. Command line loading includes the multi-file, environment variable handling of View, so for example NewView cpref loads the Control Program reference. You can also load multiple files with the GUI - use ctrl or shift to select multiple files. Well, the rest of it should be fairly obvious, I hope ;-) What's Still To Do ------------------ Quite a bit; some examples: - Global search - Fonts specified in file - Printing - Internationalisation - Bookmarks One possibly incredibly difficult thing would be to make NewView work as part of OS/2's context sensitive application help i.e. not only could it be used to view standalone documents but also within applications. This probably involves DDE and other scary things not to mention lots more undocumented stuff. What things DOES it display? -------------------------------- Contents Index Text Links Bitmaps Styles & alignments Examples (fixed-width, no right margin) Multiple windows* * Window Handling: Since it is not designed in the MDI (Multi-document interface) model, NewView has to do some odd things to handle multiple windows as they are specified for View. The results seems to be generally acceptable, but this depends on sub-windows not being listed in the contents tree. This is the case for the OS/2 Toolkit docs, the main examples of multiwindow usage. License ------- NewView is freeware, and probably GPL'd too Acknowledgements ---------------- My main contribution has been a rich text display control written from scratch. Most of the hard work of decoding the INF file format was done by others...: Cristiano Guadagnino (cristiano.guadagnino@usa.net or criguada@tin.it) Author of WarpHelp - hope I haven't annoyed you by doing my own thing, I wanted to see something happen. Cheers for the inspiration to get started! Peter Fitzsimmons (pfitz@ican.net) For the original INF bitmap decompression code used in Inf2HTML. Thanks Peter! I managed to port it without fully understanding it... :-) Ulrich Moeller (ulrich.moeller@rz.hu-berlin.de) Author of Inf2HTML http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444vnd/inf2html.htm) Carl Hauser (chauser.parc@xerox.com) Original author of INF01.DOC, the description of the INF Binary format Marcus Groeber (marcusg@ph-cip.uni-koeln.de) Added additional information to INF2A.TXT Peter Childs (pjchilds@apanix.apana.org.au) Further updates to INF03.TXT Speedsoft (http://www.speedsoft-online.de) Makers of Sibyl, the awesome Delphi clone for OS/2, Linux and Win32 - Good luck guys Mat Kramer (mek@compuserve.com) Author of VyperHelp - thanks for some suggestions on rich text controls Michael Kaply Original IPF project lead at IBM. Thanks heaps! Erik Hueslmann (wiskid@gmx.net) Author of Sibyl HelperThread components and maintainer of Sibyl mail list archive (http://sibylarchive.hypermart.net/) IBM... I think "Elwood" Composer of "Unknown Phuture" (unk.xm) - That song rocks...