PDFING NEWSLETTER NO 11 - 9th June 2004 ======================================= In our February newsletter, we promised to improve the documentation of the spooled-file to Excel feature. We have been working quite hard on this, so we hope that you will find that the new documentation of this feature is an improvement. We are also pleased to report that our new release of the Luasheet IDE provides access to this information through the new help system. In this letter: --------------- Changes to *AFPDS and *USERASCII text output Release of Luasheet IDE for Excel v1.3 PDFing release v3.0.0.10 Lua for PDFing Requests for Enhancements Changes to *AFPDS and *USERASCII text output -------------------------------------------- Customers who are "bursting" *AFPDS and *USERASCII spooled-files or who are reading the text in Luasheet and Lua for PDFing scripts should note that the latest release of PDFing may output ASCII text at different rows and columns than prvious versions. Consequently, we advise you to check the output ASCII text to see if there any differences which will effect the bursting parameters or scripts that you may have specified. We apologise for any inconvenience and will do our best to help you with any problens caused by the change. Release of Luasheet IDE for Excel v1.3 -------------------------------------- As well as improving the documentation, we have also improved the user-interface and the help-system, as well as adding some new facilities in the Luasheet language itself. Because of changes to the language, we have also released a new version of PDFing so that it supports this latest version of Luasheet. See: http://www.pdfing.com/down/luasheet.msi PDFing release v3.0.0.10 ------------------------ This release includes new facilities to the Luasheet language, fixes some major problems with *AFPDS and *USERASCII conversion to *ASCII text, improves the reporting of LPR/LPD errors and fixes two minor bugs. When using *AFPDS and *USERASCII conversion to *ASCII text, soft-font headers exceeding 2K bytes caused buffer-overflow which forced PDFing to stop without warning. A problem with "bolding" by over-printing could also cause PDFing to repeat characters in the output-text erroneously. These changes may have an effect on the ASCII text output by PDFing, please see the note above for mor detailed about this issue. See: http://www.pdfing.com/down/pdfing.msi Lua for PDFing -------------- We are pleased to report that this feature has proved to be extremely useful! Customers have used this feature to attach external files to email messages, to get the email's subject and body text directly from a spoooled-file and to integrate PDFing with document management systems. See: http://www.pdfing.com/pdfinglua.html Requests for Enhancements ------------------------- Because of the priority given to Luasheet we have not yet begun work on the new features requested by our customers. These include: Printing/Faxing the output PDF files automatically. Merging multiple PDF files into one PDF. Filter function for the NT Service controller that will allow selective display of spooled-files Attaching multiple PDF files extracted from one spooled-file to a single email. Adding "special-character" &K to contain "comma-delimited", book-mark text. Printing/Faxing is a long term project, but some of these requests will be addressed in the next release. We are always pleased to listen to your ideas and suggestions, so please keep them comming! Regards David Fowle and Jane Hearn