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<TITLE>SDF 2.001: SDF Release Notes: 2.000beta6</TITLE>
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<H1>18. 2.000beta6</H1>
<P ALIGN="Left"><A HREF="#2.000beta6 - Enhancements">Enhancements</A> | <A HREF="#2.000beta6 - Fixes">Fixes</A> | <A HREF="#2.000beta6 - Incompatibilities">Incompatibilities</A></P>
<HR>
<H2><A NAME="2.000beta6 - Enhancements">18.1. Enhancements</A></H2>
<H3><A NAME="Easier Usage">18.1.1. Easier Usage</A></H3>
<P><EM>sdfcvt</EM> is now called <A HREF="../ref/sdf.html">sdf</A>. Furthermore, a -2 option has been added which simply maps through to the relevant alias. i.e.</P>
<PRE>
   sdfcvt +sdf2ps abc.sdf
</PRE>
<P>can now be specfied via:</P>
<PRE>
   sdf -2ps abc.sdf
</PRE>
<P>As a side effect of this, the <TT>sdfcvt.ini</TT> file has disappeared - its contents have been merged into <TT>sdf.ini</TT>.</P>
<P>The <A HREF="../ref/sdf.html">sdf2...</A> wrapper scripts are still available, but are no longer documented.</P>
<P>The -2 option may <EM>eventually</EM> support a list of formats. e.g.</P>
<PRE>
   sdf -2ps,html abc.sdf
</PRE>
<H3><A NAME="FrameMaker 5 Support">18.1.2. FrameMaker 5 Support</A></H3>
<P><A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> 5 can now be used instead of <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> 4. This has several advantages:</P>
<UL>
<LI>a larger range of figure types can now be imported
<LI>book generation via <CMD>fmbatch</CMD> no longer causes a core dump
<LI>useful <A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">PDF</A> can be generated (see below).</UL>
<P>The main disadvantage is that <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> 5 has a bug in calculating the last page number in books.</P>
<H3><A NAME="Easier Figures">18.1.3. Easier Figures</A></H3>
<P>As <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> 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.</P>
<TABLE CLASS="columns" BORDER>
<TR CLASS="heading">
<TD>
<STRONG>Format</STRONG>
</TD>
<TD>
<STRONG>Extensions</STRONG>
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
html
</TD>
<TD>
gif
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
hlp
</TD>
<TD>
bmp
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
other
</TD>
<TD>
eps, then eps, then bmp
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

<P>To take advantage of these rules, specify the figure file without an extension. e.g.</P>
<PRE>
   !import &quot;sdfarch&quot;
</PRE>
<H3><A NAME="PDF Support">18.1.4. PDF Support</A></H3>
<P><A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">PDF</A> can now be generated from the <A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">PostScript</A> output from <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> 5 by using the appropriate <A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">Adobe</A> software. A <EM>contents panel</EM> is generated for normal documents.</P>
<P><HR WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="Left">
<STRONG>Note: </STRONG><A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> 5 has a bug which prevents the necessary information for a contents panel being included in the <A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">PostScript</A> when a book is printed to file via <CMD>fmbatch</CMD>. If you want a contents panel for a book, it is currently necessary to use <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> manually to set the <EM>Include Acrobat Data</EM> option and print the file.
<HR WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="Left"></P>
<H3><A NAME="Direct Conversion of Text Files">18.1.5. Direct Conversion of Text Files</A></H3>
<P>Plain text files can now be directly generated from SDF - <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> is no longer required. As a result, the conversion process is much quicker and the output looks much better.</P>
<H3><A NAME="POD Support">18.1.6. POD Support</A></H3>
<P>SDF documents can now be converted to POD, the file format used by the <A HREF="http://www.perl.com/perl/index.html">Perl</A> community. The Perl 5 distribution includes <EM>pod2man</EM> and <EM>pod2latex</EM>, so SDF files can now be indirectly converted to these formats too.</P>
<H3><A NAME="HTML Headers, Footers, Colors and Backgrounds">18.1.7. HTML Headers, Footers, Colors and Backgrounds</A></H3>
<P>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 <TT>sdf.sdm</TT> for examples.</P>
<H3><A NAME="Delphi Help Enhancements">18.1.8. Delphi Help Enhancements</A></H3>
<P>A large number of fixes and improvements have been made to this. See the <TT>samples/delphi</TT> stuff for examples.</P>
<H3><A NAME="Topics Mode">18.1.9. Topics Mode</A></H3>
<P>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 <EM>topics mode</EM> which illustrates how this might work. To try it, define each topic as a separate file and use the following command:</P>
<PRE>
   sdf -2html -ftopics *.sdf
</PRE>
<P>The main document will be converted to a table of contents. The remaining documents will be converted to topics.</P>
<P><HR WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="Left">
<STRONG>Note: </STRONG>If the -ftopics option is not provided, a monolithic document will be generated.
<HR WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="Left"></P>
<H3><A NAME="Configuration Reporting">18.1.10. Configuration Reporting</A></H3>
<P>Reference documentation for an SDF module can now be automatically generated by using the following command:</P>
<PRE>
   sdf -2html mymodule.sdm
</PRE>
<P>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.</P>
<H3><A NAME="fm2ps">18.1.11. fm2ps</A></H3>
<P>An alias has been added for <A HREF="../ref/sdfbatch.html">sdfbatch</A> called <CMD>fm2ps</CMD>. This command converts <A HREF="http://www.frame.com/PRODUCTS/Products.doc.html">FrameMaker</A> documents to <A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">PostScript</A>. It can be called via eiher way below:</P>
<PRE>
   sdfbatch +fm2ps abc.doc
   fm2ps abc.doc
</PRE>
<HR>
<H2><A NAME="2.000beta6 - Fixes">18.2. Fixes</A></H2>
<P>Unknown variables in restricted families (like DOC, OPT, etc) are now flagged as unknown (rather than read-only).</P>
<P>A page break is added by <A HREF="../ref/mbuild_t.html">build_title</A> when <A HREF="http://www.adobe.com">PostScript</A> is being generated.</P>
<P>A number of pretty-printing bugs have been removed.</P>
<P>The escaping of special characters (&lt;, &gt;, &amp;) has been fixed in HTML.</P>
<P>Spacing inside table cells (for Netscape) has been improved.</P>
<HR>
<H2><A NAME="2.000beta6 - Incompatibilities">18.3. Incompatibilities</A></H2>
<P>None.</P>
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