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HelpSetMaker began its life after some disappointing experiences with another tool for JavaHelp HelpSet production. The development stages evolved somehow like this:
In the beginning, the LexicalScanner class with the scanner for the STML language was written. It creates the internal token stream.
After that, the STMLParser emerged from the dust to make an entity tree out of the token stream. The first parts of this system cared especially about the list evaluation.
Next step was the STMLEditor widget. It gave for the first time the possibility to enter some text which was then presented as HTML text in the output window. For this, the lexer and the scanner were used internally.
Finally, the ProjectFrame class and the ProjectEngine were created. Together with them, the tree view of the documents contained in a help set was created.
This creation way lead very early to the current rather independent editor widget which loads and especially stores the documents on its own. This whole structure is also in the spirit of a complete uncoupling of the document tree and the actual documents: HelpSetMaker does never load all the documents into memory. It only holds the document tree and the information in its nodes in memory. The actual documents (which can lead to rather large document structures) are only loaded one by one.
Version 0.2: First actually useable version. Contained only today's ProjectFrame. Project base directory was given through command line. Was already used for first production usage. Could not yet produce output.
Version 0.4: First version with real program frame. Knew also how to produce HTML4- and HelpSet-output.
Version 0.6: Many improvements. Most importantly: typewriter text and CSS support.
Version 0.6.1: Additional extensions and bugfixes, among them much enhanced state storage of editor layout and internal states. Addition of :h3 and :h4 tags.
Version 0.6.2: First public release on SourceForge. No big changes against 0.6.1
Version 0.6.3: New output mode: One big HTML page. Bugfix: Anchors actually work now...
Version 0.7.0: Several changes:
Complete rewrite of image handling code. Presents now image icons and supports drag'n'drop of images.
Parser changes to drop direct HTML tags in STML input. A transition help is provided.
Image size is now put into the IMG tag
“Batch mode” to create output via command line
Version 0.8.0: LaTeX output. Introduction of project settings
Version 0.8.1 (unreleased): Undo/redo support in the editor, much better document tree navigation, LaTeX creation cleaned up and modernized regarding package usage
Version 0.9.0: Integration of fulltext-search into HelpSet output, enhanced file tree output, even more documentation.
Version 0.9.1: Minor enhancements: external links with [[ ]], menu hotkeys. Some documentation extensions and corrections.
Version 0.9.2: Several enhancements:
Direct creation of JAR file containing the HelpSet.
Consistent encoding of the output, HelpSetMaker is not assuming ISO-8859-1 to be the default encoding on the platform any more (thanks to Torstein Olsen).
Norwegian translation (thanks to Torstein Olsen).
Version 0.9.3: Some enhancements which cumulated over some months:
Relative storage of image paths if within the project. This eases co-working on a document through some kind of source code management tremendously.
More general HTML output of anchors (“<a ...></a>” instead of “<a ... />”).
CSS can be applied for content frame now, also.
Version 0.9.4: Most important change is the vastly enhanced support for collaborative work on a project through some external means of version management. Additionally, the thumbnail management has been improved:
The main configuration and settings file for a project has been changed completely. It is now XML-based. Any old projects are converted automatically the first time they are opened with the new HelpSetMaker version. If the conversion fails, the project is left untouched.
New sections of the document are not numbered any more, but named randomly. This removes the problem that two co-workers could create section files with the same name unintentionally.
Thumbnails are stored only now if needed. If they are stored, JPEG format is used and they are stored for each needed size seperately.
Rescaled thumbnails are much smoother now.
In pagewise printed document types (HTML, HelpSet), HelpSetMaker can now add navigation links to each page for going to the next or previous page.
For LaTeX and HTML output, typographical quotation marks can be used.
Version 0.9.5: Bugfixes in conversion code.
Version 0.9.6:
Project-global integrity checks for image references and project-internal hyperlinks.
Image library rebuilding and thumbnail size changing gives more feedback during operation.
Minor changes to XML file format to cope better with version management needs.
Version 0.9.7 (not packaged):
New option to use “:label” as base for export filenames for HelpSets and HTML4 filetrees.
Optional usage of the “hyperref” package in LaTeX output.
Version 1.0.0: Bugfixes and some feature enhancements finally make me this naming “1.0”. Changes cover different parts of the program:
Interface and STML:
Image presentation now shows directory tree and not all files in one big heap any more.
Batch mode cleaned up.
STML is now forcably stored in Latin-1 encoding.
REM tag for STML
Some GUI artwork
HTML-based output formats:
HelpSet files have correct DOCTYPE statements.
Generated HTML is more standard-compliant generally.
HTML's table of contents features different class attributes for the <li> tags in different depths.
Export in Eclipse-compatible helpsets. This feature is largely untested.
LaTeX-based output:
pdfLaTeX can be run under control of HelpSetMaker.
LaTeX sectioning can now also spawn \part definitions.
\selectlanguage is now always set correctly.
German output allows now hyphenation of words which contain dashes (“-“).
The documentation has been extended and reworked and all screenshots of HelpSetMaker have been redone to face the current program version.
1.0.1: Multiple bugfixes and feature enhancements:
LaTeX configuration is vastly extended. \newenvironments for div parts and arbitrary document openings can be defined.
Headlines and image captions have not been converted correctly in HTML-beased output: Encoding and quote signs could have been wrong.
The project window is now always opened so that it does not exceed the program's main window size.
For HelpSet output, main.hs can be created with a locale infix (“main_en_GB.hs”).
The project locale can be selected out of the whole bunch of predefined Java locales.
HelpSetMaker does now also feature a French user interface.
The french translation has been done by Bart Jourquin, Belgium, who also gave useful bug reports and suggestions to some of the points above. Many thanks!
1.0.2: Image handling vastly improved:
Images in the editor preview windows and in all output modes can be scaled now.
Thumbnails are managed in a much more efficient way now. Changing thumbnail sizes is not time-consuming any more once the thumbnails are created.
1.1.0: Feature release.
Macros: Reuseable portions of text. Markup and parameters are possible. Macros can be paragraphs on their own or inline.
On creating a new project, HelpSetMaker is now much smarter in setting up the initial shape of the project frame.
New projects use UTF-8 encoding for all STML files. There is no conversion mechanism for old projects, however. This can be archieved through external tools like recode and changing the encoding property in the project's settings.
Fixed long-standing bug in lexical scanner: Character escaping finally works correctly, things like ::Look\::: gives a teletype-colon and end the teletype markup.
Arrows in all four directions.
1.1.1: Minor features and bugfixes.
Non-breakable spaces (“_”) at line begin lead now to indented lines in both HTML and LaTeX-based output. This allows e.g. representation of source code or similiarly formatted texts.
Index creation was broken due to some XML headers which slipped into the HelpSet output and confused the mimosic Java HTML parser. The problem is fixed.
Encoding for macro reading during output production has not been set explicitly leading to wrong character representation under certain circumstances. Fixed.
Projects are always saved before output is produced.
It's possible to let HelpSetMaker output the titletag attribute in HelpSet output, so far this option was only available for HTML4-output.
HelpSets show the start page as default output if no explicit output page is given.
1.2.0: Better support of collaborative work
Image cache metainformation is stored in the user-specific configuration files. This helps version control systems to merge hsm.xml more reliably.
The PDFLaTeX binary name now defaults to “pdflatex”. This should make PDF file generation working out of the box if PDFLaTeX is installed correctly.
New projects automatically get an image directory “pics” which can be used for image storage.
| < STML reference | Important notes for users of older versions > |