New version pre-announcement

I have been working on a new version

Contrary to what I said earlier this will go out as 4.20 (not 4.10).  The reason for this is simply I think it is way too confusing to have 4.01 and 4.10!

In this thread I am going to "pre-announce" SOME of the changes in the new version

You are welcome to comment and ask questions.

I expect the new version to go out initially as a beta, hopefully within the next 2 weeks APPROXIMATELY.   Initially

If you would like to help beta test, please post your name, and email to this thread, or email me at webmaster@ebookcompiler.com with BETA in the subject line, please include which version of Windows and IE you have on your system.  

The ideal beta tester would be somebody who can test the new version hard, is a reasonably PC/HTML aware (or even an expert), can report any problems clearly and concisely (e..g. exact steps to reproduce the problem), and is not going to be crushed if they find a problem in the beta (which is possible -that's the point!).  Beta testers can keep the old version on your PC as well.

If beta testing, please do NOT pass on any ebooks you make with the beta, wait for the official release, or compile ebooks for distribution with the old version.

For those waiting for the new version who aren't interested in beta testing... I don't expect your wait to be too long. I won't give even an approximate time frame though, as the time frame will depend on the results of the beta testing.  Once the beta testing is complete, the official release which will either be 4.20 or 4.21 will be available to download from ebookcompiler.com and will also be announced in our email newsletter.

Splash screens
- Set time delay
- Displayed much earlier during load process
- Optional % bar underneath while book is loading

Speed
- EBooks load much faster.  This is probably not noticeable on small ebooks, but on large ones, you should have a noticeable improvement

Form processing in Activ Script
- You can now link HTML forms to Activ Script commands.  Simple example at the bottom

Setting up the colors (Edit System Pages)
- This now uses the correct colors, and shows HTML hex color codes.

Prompts/Language
- Most of the text/prompts/menus/etc. now come from a separate language file.  When you compile your ebook this is included automatically
- This has a couple of benefits:
1. It reduces the ebook size (by about 40K-50K in a typical example)
2. Potentially this file is editable.  This allows you to translate menus, dialog boxes, toolbars etc. or simply change the names of things.  The reason I say potentially is that we don't yet have an editor for these files...   BTW there are some special cases, but overall I expect this to work pretty well for 8-bit languages that use Left-To-Right text in the standard character set.  So this would include German, French, Spanish Dutch, Portuguese etc. It wouldn't (say) include Chinese (16 bit character set), Russian or Greek (different character set), or Hebrew (Right to left and different character set)

----

Here is an example of how to do a form:-

In an HTML file include this:

<FORM METHOD="POST" NAME="DoesntMatter" ACTION="#!form.as">
First Name
<BR><INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="First" VALUE="" SIZE="32>
<BR><BR>
Last Name
<BR><INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="Last" VALUE="" SIZE="32>
<BR><BR>
<INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="OK">
</FORM>

In a text file called form.as include this

FSET('firstname','First')
FSET('lastname','Last')
MESSAGEBOX('Hello {firstname} {lastname}')

Explanation

In the HTML ACTION= in the form contains an Activ Link, containing the Activ Script code.  In this example, an Activ Link to run form.as

window.external.ActivGet
window.external.ActivSet
window.external.ActivRun

Allows you get, and set Activ Variables from VBScript/JScript plus invoke Activ Script or external programs from your VBScript/JScript

Also worth remembering is that while VBScript/JScript variables disappear when you load a new page, Activ Variables don't .... so you if you need persistence for your JScript stuff, now you have a way

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