Newton Book Reader Extension Changelog


0.3.6:

Very minor changes here.  The big reason for this release was to
ensure compatibility with current versions of Firefox, SeaMonkey,
and Flock.  The bulk of testing is still on Firefox, though;
SeaMonkey and Flock should still be considered experimental.

There's also some preliminary support for update detection in
place.  From now on, the Newton Book Reader Extension should
automatically notice when an updated version becomes available.

0.3.5:

Quite a few changes have been made.  First off this version will
now work with Firefox versions greater than 1.5; in fact, it'll
work with versions up to 1.5.9.9.  There should be a new version
of this reader before there's another major Firefox release.  Also,
this reader will now work with both Seamonkey and Flock, although
these environments haven't really been tested and should be viewed
as being experimental.

Full table of contents support has been added.  In fact, support
for potentially multiple tables of contents exists (a single Newton
book can have a regular table of contents, an index of authors,
etc., although it's quite rare) as well as the regular two-level
hierarchy commonly seen.  Clicking an entry jumps to that section
of the book.

Intra-paragraph links are now supported and are clickable.

The oddity with the font sizes has been resolved.  It turns out
that when Newton Press was referring to font sizes, it meant pixels
not points.  This (coupled with a slight widening of the window to
accommodate the scroll bar and a reduction of the standard line
height) makes for a display that's eerily close to Newton Press'
for typical books.  There are now just a couple of minor known
issues.  Of course, it also means that now fonts are quite a bit
smaller and less legible; selectable font sizes have to be
addressed via a user preference in a future release.

Bordered and inverted paragraphs are now fully supported.

Menus have been reordered slightly to better take advantage of
the new features.

0.3:

The main recursive algorithm for parsing books has been split up
somewhat.  Now, every slot within a frame that holds a pointer yields
control back to the Mozilla platform.  This sacrifices quite a bit of
speed, but gets rid of all of those "Unresponsive Script Warnings"
that plagued version 0.2 (even when dom.max_script_run_time is set
to just 5).  It makes the extension *much* more usable.  It's a big
change though requiring the addition of a global call stack to
manually track info that used to be handled automatically by the
original recursive design.  Because of this big change, this is still
an alpha release.  The speed hit is also big enough to be a real drag
on longer books, and we have to look for some new optimizations.

The book info and package info sections have been changed to use XUL
grids.  Before, they had looked barely acceptable on Mac OS X, but
looked like they'd been hit with an ugly stick on Windows XP.  Now
they're acceptable everywhere.

The window title now changes to "Working..." when a book is being
parsed.  Keeping the old title through a potentially long conversion
was confusing.

The initially displayed help file has been updated to reflect the
changes made.


0.2:

First Public Release.