Sophie Early Release Candidate 6

NOTE

Sophie RC6 doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). We've identified the problem and will soon have RC7 available for downloading. If you need a copy of Sophie that will run on Leopard immediately, contact us for a developer build.

Change History

Over 204 bugs have resolved since RC5. Although bug fixing was a large part of the work, we did extensive changes to the software to add new features and improve how Sophie works. We completely rewrote the entire text edit subsystem to resolve issues found in RC5, along with adding new feature to the template system to enhance the ability of Sophie to make books. During this process we replaced the entire undo/redo subsystem with a new code base which greatly simplified the interface for developers and enabled many more commands/actions to be undoable.

The highlights of the last 4 months of work are:

Editing fixes

• The entire textual edit subsystem was rewritten. This covers basic typing, and cut/copy/paste of data, both internally within Sophie and externally between Sophie books and other applications on your computer. This also covers where the selection point is, what range of textual data has been selected, and cursor key movements. There were many issues with how the cursor was placed into the content tree (usually a wrong location, resulting in an error) that were fixed in the rewrite.

Font fixes

• Performance improvements in how fonts/characters are selected and rendered, thus making Sophie much more responsive.

Style fixes

• How styles are defined for paragraphs and overridden for character section ranges was reworked so that you can apply styles to paragraphs, turn other styles on or off based on character ranges, and then revise the paragraph setting with rational results occurring.
• Along with this we added Underlining and StrikeOut styles.

Book storage fixes

• Not saving images that were background images on a page.
• Book read errors related to the use of templates.
• Ensured that double-clicking a Sophie book in Windows will open it.

Stickies fixes

• Fixes for errors when a sticky was deleted.

Pages fixes

• Changing the page order would confuse the compositor.
• Faster thumbnail generation.
• A number of errors were fixed where the compositor would try to create an infinite number of pages.

Markers fixes

• Fixed many issues with highlight or action markers not being correctly managed when editing text data, and markers not being deleted when text was delete, or properly duplicated when text containing markers was copied.
• Edit text that belonged to action or highlight markers was fraught with disaster in RC4, this has all been fixed.

Template fixes

• Fixes for pivot point usage in templates.
• Adding template based flow and comment frames.

Timelines/movies/audio fixes

• Better parsing of text entry data.
• Undo/redo fixes.
• Better handling of errors on fetching media from the internet.
• Fixes for issues with regard to drag and drop of media from the operating system to the timeline.
• Enable simple MPEG format playback on UNIX again.
• Performance improvements in rending movie frames to a Sophie page.

Resource fixes

• Use of UTF8 characters for file names to support Japanese users.
• Faster thumbnail rendering, and retaining the thumbnail which improves book opening speed.
• Removal of compression on JPEG/PNG data to improve initial rendering speed and book opening speed.
• Rewrote cache logic so you can import many GB of photos into Sophie without memory problems.
• Web based books access logic was revised and tuned.
• Integration of undo/redo when adding/removing resources.

UI fixes

• Fixes for UI behaviour where flaps would come to the front at the wrong time.

RTF fixes

• Many fixes for RTF parsing

Menu fixes

• Cleanup of application menus.

Known Issues

• copy and paste of frames between books will result in a broken book, avoid copy and paste of data between books at this time.
• Italic/bold emphasis may not import correctly from RTF files.
• If you delete markers/actions when editting text the markers might not get deleted.
• If you make templates you should use the developer build it has many fixes for template related issues.
• When saving a new book, be careful, a bug exists that will let you overwrite and destroy an existing book without any prompt it is going to do so.
• If you have a range of text data selected you cannot replace it via pasting plain text data from another application.
• Copy and paste of markers/actions/highlights between frames will result in the markers being mangled.

These are known errors when using menus in RC6. They do not affect your ability to author or read Sophie books:

• The Publish Book for OLPC menu command causes an error. The format for publishing for OLPC is still being developed.
• The validate content tree menu command causes an error, this is a developer feature which wasn't integrated into RC6.
• The undo/redo history menu command causes an error, this is a developer feature which has been removed.

Important Privacy Notice for Sophie Users

The Sophie software application sends notification of errors to a member of the Sophie technical team. Those error notifications include stack traces which, depending on the error, may include information from your machine, including part of the content of the book you were working in, a path to a book, a path to a resource, or the path to your Sophie application. We use this information for debugging purposes only - nothing else.

License

Sophie is under a version of the BSD license. Copyright (c) 2004-2006, Regents of the University of Southern California. View the full license