What's new in NetPen 0.97 Beta
Mar 19, 2009
- If text or an image is in the current selection and copied (e.g., CTRL+C); the last selected text or image is also copied into the clipboard's buffer allowing it to be pasted into other applications.
- Pasting text from Microsoft Word has been worked-around. Since Word supports text and image for any clipboard operation you don't really know what's on the clipboard (it's up to the receiving program to decide what it wants). NetPen always goes for an image if it's available so that you get whatever special fonts, colors, or formatting the other program did for you. The problem with Java is that the alpha (transparency) bits get lost during this operation - they become black. So, normal black text on a white background from Word shows up as black text on a black background; not of any use at all. NetPen now uses a detection scheme to see if the image is all black; if the image is all black NetPen dumps the image and uses text. A word of warning; the all-black detection is examining every pixel and therefore slow; so copying more than a few lines from Word may take a while.
- Text editing was greatly improved. Double-clicking on the text pops up a dialog where the text can be edited.
- A link to the Google Spell Checker API was added and removed (Google's API won't handle more than a couple of lines at a time). It's a shame as the Google Spell checker was very nice and supported multiple languages.
- The Jazzy spell checker was added to the new text editing dialog. Incorrect words are highlighted, to correct the word with a suggested spelling select the word (double click it), then right click and select from the list. You can also ignore words or add them to a personal dictionary. All dictionaries must reside in NetPen's 'lib' directory. Which dictionary is used can be changed by editing the dict entry in the .INI file. The user dictionary must be named user.dict and must exist even if it is empty. Two dictionaries are currently included, a US (default) and a UK version. Dictionaries are just lists of words, if you put one together for your language send it to me and I'll make it available on this web site. If you find an error in a dictionary please let me know.
- Simple HTML commands were added for the text editor. To use them, select the text and click the button. Note that this will embed the HTML directly into the string - looks ugly in the editor and the spell checker will complain about it, but it gives you great control over what you want to see.
- Known Issue - when converting a string to/from normal text to/from html the text goes down/up the height of one line.