Wp2Html News on 9 May 2001

NOTE: New email address andrew@brackenbeds.co.uk
Old address (andrew@brackenb.demon.co.uk) will still work for a while, but will finally be removed.

Here are the release note for Version 3.3. As always all versions
I am able to build myself, that is Windows/DOS, Aix, Solaris, Linux
are made available at the same time. Sources are also available for
the other platforms.

Wp2Html version 3.3
=====================
There have been several releases of wp2html over the last year, either fixing bugs, extending the functionallity or responding to user requests. This resulted in the code going  through versions 3.2a to 3.2f.

This new full version formally releases the latest version which has significantly improved handling of MS Word files (Word 97 and Word 2000), especially regarding the way fonts are handled and displayed.


Bug Fixes and Extensions
------------------------
1. Huge Word files.
==================
 MS word (or I guess some WordPerfect 8 or higher) documents which
are "wrapped" up in the OLE file format wrapper can exceed 8MB. In
this case the code for unwrapping these files failed, as it was
unaware of a limit at this file size, which triggers an extra
storage block for the data above 8MB. This is now corrected and
wp2html will (given enough memory and disk space) process these files
too.

2. Multibyte Characters in Style Names.
======================================
WordPerfect allows extended (multinational) characters to be used in
style names, such as U(umlaut)ber. If such style names were used in
an output statement such as

defaultStyleOn="\n<!-- WP Paired Style On: %s -->"

and this style happened to be INSIDE a run of text that was being fed
to the internal text buffer (%e, %f), then the multibyte character
would be copied into the text buffer and would appear if that buffer
was letter output. This is an unusual situation but has been corrected.


3. Endnotes and Footnotes in WORD files
=======================================
Word stores endnotes and footnotes differently while treating them both
as footnote references in the text. This was wrongly handled before and
could even give a core dump. Now fixed.

4. Bookmarks in MS Word.
========================
Bookmarks inserted in MW word files are now translated via the BookKark tag and will act as HTML anchors for HRef jumps. This means Word documents which use internal hyperlinks will convert fully and correctly. External links will work too if the path to 

5. Hypertext references with spaces in
======================================
In MS word documents you may insert bookmarks which are then translated to Hypertext references. These can contain spaces, especially as on Windows long file names tend to include spaces. Wp2Html will now render Hypertext links based on these with the spa

6. Multiple columns
===================
This used to be handled using the Netscape specific MULTICOL html extension, but this fails for Explorer. The code has been changed to work with Tables instead and the configuration file (wp2html.cfg) includes this mapping by default.

7. Word Formatting
===============
The way MS word files are handled has been greatly improved. The defined fonts, colours, sizes of text are now preserved where possible and problems which could occur with incorrectly nested HTML tags has been resolved. This also means that wp2html could 

8. Fast saved (complex) Word files
==================================
These are now handled correctly in all cases (so far found). However it is still much better not to use the MS word fast save feature in the first place. The message which tells you the file is fast saved (was a warning) is now removed.




              Version 3.2 Release Notes, November 99
              ======================================
This was major new release which adds support for reading and converting
Microsoft Word files. Additionally the Windows/DOS version is now
only available in 32 bit form as hardware and software for this is
now the standard (i386 and Win32 or Windows 95 or later)
This means that the graphics conversion program, wpg2gif, is now
included in the Windows/DOS distribution as well as the UNIX versions
as before.

Features
--------

See the manual which is for version 3.2