H1: 2.000beta7b

!subsections "Enhancements,Fixes,Incompatibilities"

H2: Enhancements

The new features in this version are:

!block sections
. Object catalog formatting
. Subsections support
. Appending text to phrases
. New figure attributes
. Other 2.000beta7b goodies
!endblock

Details are given below.

H3: Object catalog formatting

The user can now control how a catalog of objects
(e.g. a table of references) is presented by
setting the {{columns}} and {{compact}} parameters.
{{columns}} is a comma-separated list of:

E:   [tag":"]attribute

:where:

* {{tag}} is a phrase style (or expression format)
* {{attribute}} is the name of an attribute of the class.

{{compact}} is a boolean flag which reduces the spacing
between the rows in the table.

This feature is extremely useful for building "project overview"
Web pages. See the SDF document catalog for an example.

H3: Subsections support

The new {{MAC:subsections}} macro can now be used to specify
the subsections in a topic. This has several advantages:

* subsections can be given a hypertext {{id}} which contains the
  current topic name (making them unique)
* for HTML, a "jump line" can be generated.

For example:

E:   H1: MyApp
E:   !subsections "Purpose,Usage,Description,Examples"

In this case, the {{MAC:subsections}} macro changes the
{{id}} generated for the headings listed to:

E:   MyApp - {{heading}}

For HTML, it will also generate a line of jumps to the headings.

H3: Appending text to phrases

Event processing on phrases has now been extended to support
appending text to a phrase, i.e. prepending text to the rest of
the paragraph. Text is appended by setting {{$append}}.
For example:

E:   !on phrase 'PRD';; $append .= '(tm)'

Note: This feature is used to provide "qsd-style" (document name and code)
expansion for REF phrases.

H3: New figure attributes

The {{IMPORT}} phrase style and the {{MAC:import}} macro
now support new attributes:

* {{base}} - the prefix to prepend to the figure pathname
  to get the location needed for the HTML output
* {{jump}} - the URL to jump to
* {{border}} - the border width in pixels.

These attributes are currently only supported for HTML output.

H3: Other 2.000beta7b goodies

The {{FILT:table}} filter now supports new attributes:

* {{cellpadding}} - the pixels between the cell boundary and contents
* {{cellspacing}} - the pixels between cells.

These attributes are currently only supported for HTML output.

In topics mode, the default header for the main topic now
contains jumps to the next and previous topics.

The {{SUBR:Values}} subroutine can now be used to lookup the value
of an attribute for an object in a class.

{{Calculation subroutines}} can now be defined for attributes in
a class. See {{FILE:perllib/sdf/values.pl}} for examples.

H2: Fixes

Unzipping SDF 2.000beta7a on MS-DOS caused problems as symbolic
links on Un*x were not being unzipped correctly.
This should now be fixed - the new distribution does not contain
symbolic links for files, just directories.

SECT phrases are now output again in [[PostScript]] documents.
(However, there is a still a bug in the cross reference support
which caused this problem.)

A number of obscure errors in formatting list items for HTML
are now fixed.

Warnings are now produced again for unknown parameters to filters.
(This was broken by the performance enhancements added in
2.000beta5, I think.)

An error is now output for tables which have repeated headings.
Previously, columns were silently "ignored".

A "noheadings" table with no data rows no longer produces
unexpected output.

A number of problems are now fixed in the {{mincom/mims}} library.
In particular, the screen dumps for MSM000A and MSM000B now look
as they should.

H2: Incompatibilities

The {{sdf2mimsus}} and {{sdf2qsdus}} aliases have been renamed
to {{sdf2mimsl}} and {{sdf2qsdl}} respectively.