18. 2.000beta6
Enhancements | Fixes | Incompatibilities
18.1. Enhancements
18.1.1. Easier Usage
sdfcvt is now called sdf. Furthermore, a -2 option has been added which simply maps through to the relevant alias. i.e.
sdfcvt +sdf2ps abc.sdf
can now be specfied via:
sdf -2ps abc.sdf
As a side effect of this, the sdfcvt.ini file has disappeared - its contents have been merged into sdf.ini.
The sdf2... wrapper scripts are still available, but are no longer documented.
The -2 option may eventually support a list of formats. e.g.
sdf -2ps,html abc.sdf
18.1.2. FrameMaker 5 Support
FrameMaker 5 can now be used instead of FrameMaker 4. This has several advantages:
- a larger range of figure types can now be imported
- book generation via
fmbatch no longer causes a core dump - useful PDF can be generated (see below).
The main disadvantage is that FrameMaker 5 has a bug in calculating the last page number in books.
18.1.3. Easier Figures
As FrameMaker 5 supports a larger range of figure types, the search rules for figures without an extension have now been expanded. The new rules are given below.
| Format | Extensions |
| html | gif |
| hlp | bmp |
| other | eps, then eps, then bmp |
To take advantage of these rules, specify the figure file without an extension. e.g.
!import "sdfarch"
18.1.4. PDF Support
PDF can now be generated from the PostScript output from FrameMaker 5 by using the appropriate Adobe software. A contents panel is generated for normal documents.
Note: FrameMaker 5 has a bug which prevents the necessary information for a contents panel being included in the PostScript when a book is printed to file via
18.1.5. Direct Conversion of Text Files
Plain text files can now be directly generated from SDF - FrameMaker is no longer required. As a result, the conversion process is much quicker and the output looks much better.
18.1.6. POD Support
SDF documents can now be converted to POD, the file format used by the Perl community. The Perl 5 distribution includes pod2man and pod2latex, so SDF files can now be indirectly converted to these formats too.
18.1.7. HTML Headers, Footers, Colors and Backgrounds
Headers and footers to place at the top and bottom of each HTML page can now be defined. Colors and background images can also be specified. See the sdf.sdm for examples.
18.1.8. Delphi Help Enhancements
A large number of fixes and improvements have been made to this. See the samples/delphi stuff for examples.
18.1.9. Topics Mode
When generating HTML, it is often useful to create a table of contents and a large number of small pages, rather than a monolithic document. This release includes a prototype version of topics mode which illustrates how this might work. To try it, define each topic as a separate file and use the following command:
sdf -2html -ftopics *.sdf
The main document will be converted to a table of contents. The remaining documents will be converted to topics.
Note: If the -ftopics option is not provided, a monolithic document will be generated.
18.1.10. Configuration Reporting
Reference documentation for an SDF module can now be automatically generated by using the following command:
sdf -2html mymodule.sdm
A summary of the terms, references, organisations and products, if any, will be included in the generated documentation. As a result, the reference documentation for a project library serves as a glossary and bibliography for the project.
18.1.11. fm2ps
An alias has been added for sdfbatch called
sdfbatch +fm2ps abc.doc fm2ps abc.doc
18.2. Fixes
Unknown variables in restricted families (like DOC, OPT, etc) are now flagged as unknown (rather than read-only).
A page break is added by build_title when PostScript is being generated.
A number of pretty-printing bugs have been removed.
The escaping of special characters (<, >, &) has been fixed in HTML.
Spacing inside table cells (for Netscape) has been improved.
18.3. Incompatibilities
None.