What is New =========== 3.90.08 July 27, 2009 ===================== All reported problems (and they were minor and few) corrected. The beta is very stable. We plan to release it in about a week pending the bug reports that come in in the next few days. Version 3.00 will be released at the same time which will conclude all support for the legacy /9x series of Windows. The unicode version requires XP or later to work. We have tested the program with the unicode Russian message file and it works. Read the Compatibility section at the end of this document. Know problems: 1) Hints are sometimes not 100% on the screen. Codegear will have to fix this. 2) Help system does not work under WINE sometimes. 3) Floating Window work erratically. I plan to work on this in the next few days. Please include your phone number and a time when you can be reached when you send us bug reports. That way, if we need clarification on anything, we can get it. 3.90 July 11, 2009 Unicode Beta =============================== READ CAREFULLY--ALL OF IT! 1) Unicode supported throughout the program. XP or later is now required to run the program. It will no longer work under the Windows 9X operating system. There have been massive internal changes to the program to make this work.(e.g. 15-20K of code changes!) There are bugs! This also means that Bibles which required special fonts and the Fonts.Map file to work correctly will have to be converted to unicode. The Fonts.Map file is obsolete. OLBGrk and OLBHeb fonts are no longer used. 2) Compile tools process unicode modules correctly. We processed and accessed correctly the Ethiopian Amharic Bible which is fully unicode. Any module containing characters greater than #127 will result in a unicode format module which cannot be read by the non-unicode version of the Online Bible. 3) Compile tools are now memory based and cache most things in memory when compiling. They were originally created to run on an 8 mhz /286 with 640K of ram and used disk space. We estimate that to compile a 5 meg text module you will need 25 megs of ram. The tools run much faster than before. What took 3 to four minutes now takes about one minute! Originally, it took three and a half hours on a /286 to compile the AV Bible in 1987! It now takes about a minute. 4) Full support for Wine which means the program will run on Mac and Linux with Wine. Wine version is restricted to the starter pack modules. It requires an unlock fee like the Pocket PC to access all modules. We would like to recover some of our development expenses. The existing Windows betas do run under Wine. 5) Program is at least two to three times faster than before, even with full unicode support. 6) Program development done under Delphi 2009 (by CodeGear) and uses enhanced GUI features on Vista and later systems. Under XP the appearance of the GUI has not changed much from previous versions. Some of the GUI enhancements are: a) Slider bar on Reference window b) Selected tab is highlighted (either as blue or white) c) Multi-line hints and balloon hints on Vista Under Vista the GUI interface is much more elegant. 7) New Textbox to replace the TRichEdit box we have used since 1996. This added about 4K of new code plus changed lots of existed code. Some shortcut keys have changed to allow cursor movements to be more friendly for JAWS, WindowEyes and other screen readers. Major cursor key changes are: a) Up, Down, Left and Right arrow keys move the cursor only. b) Control Key + Left or Right keys moves you to the previous or next item. This is new since we want the arrow keys to normally. The new textbox has been a major internal change that affects just about every display window. Previously we had to second guess what was going on in the TRichEdit control, now we know and the control itself can tell us when its needs reloading as well as many other things. We have held off doing this for years knowing full well how difficult it will be to do. We were not disappointed! The regression test alone for this code comprises over 200 tests which take a day or so to do all by themselves. There will be bugs here we am certain. 8) Sync Scrolling works differently. It is only activated when you load a note or a version or when you move through the text box with the arrow keys and the control key depressed. Otherwise you can roam around the box with the arrow keys and not cause sync scrolling to occur. 9) Pocket PC updated to handle the new unicode module format and eliminates OLBHeb.TTF. You may have to reset you Pocket PC to delete this legacy font from your fonts directory. We have replaced it with an old Times New Roman font that contains most of the unicode characters and displays Hebrew well. To delete OlbHeb.TTf use File Explorer on the Pocket PC to locate the font under the Windows\Fonts directory. Press the stylus on the name to get a popup menu. Rename the font to "x.x" and then delete it. 10) The program requires a version 2.99 or later version of the non-unicode version to be installed before you can upgrade to this new version. Much of the legacy upgrade code for obsolete modules has been deleted. 11) PNG images files are now supported. 12) Editor works with full unicode but allows old Ascii characters to define unicode characters. ... -> Unicode Ditto = #8230; ` -> Unicode Opening Single Quote = #8216; ' -> Unicode Closing Single Quote = #8217; `` -> Unicode Opening Double Quote = #8220; '' -> Unicode Closing Double Quote = #8221; -- -> Unicode Long Dash = #8212; << -> Unicode Opening French Double Quote = #171; >> -> Unicode Closing French Double Quote = #187; When you format a paragraph containing these characters, they are auomatically converted to their unicode equivalents. For now the Greek and Hebrew characters are not mapped into unicode but you can enter Greek and Hebrew unicode including all the accents and vowel points. Note that the Ascii dash - #45, and the double quote " #34 are not mapped. The unicode dash #8211 is mapped into the Ascii dash otherwise the RTF encoding breaks. All characters greater the #127 are considered to be unicode, and if a file contains unicode characters, the editor saves it in unicode format which is incompatible with non-unicode version of Online Bible. 13) Only fonts with a suffix of ".TTF" are recognized. These are copied to the Windows Fonts directory and are not deleted by an uninstall. Before they were copied to a private directory and a registry entry made informing windows of their location. You still have to reboot the computer if new fonts are added. Adding new fonts should now be a very rare occurance unlike with the non-unicode version. Only a handful special unicode Bible modules require special fonts like the Ethiopian Amharic Bibles. 14) The single click hyperlink lookup only works on highlighted text. Otherwise double click to look up a word. These are very major changes and should be a fruitful source of bugs for a few weeks. We will try to correct them as quickly as possible, posting new betas daily if necessary. About a dozen Bibles will need to be converted to unicode and this will be done after the unicode version is released, likely in August. WARNING: Once you start to create unicode files, (which is very easy to do!) you cannot revert back to the non-unicode Online Bible. Compatibility ============= The new unicode version will run all existing modules except those which contain a Fonts.map file. Only about a six to eight Bible modules are affected like Arabic, Chinese, Russian and so forth which do not use 100% Roman characters. These will be converted to unicode in the next month or so. New modules compiled with the unicode version will not likely run on the old non-unicode version. We will be posting new modules compiled with the new version. The old modules will be moved to a different location for download for those who still require that format. Those requiring the old modules will either have to purchase a CD with them on or download them. For the next year or so we will still have a CD available for those running the old version under Windows 9X. These old modules will not longer be updated. Only those running Windows 9X, will require the old non-unicode Online Bible. We are trying to make the transition to pure unicode as painless as possible.