Image Markup Tool blog

Dealt with this here.

Got the following bug report from Paolo:

There's a strange bug that seems to affect both IMT and Transformer; I remember I reported it some time ago, though it's still persisting not only in the Italian but also in all the other translation files of IMT.

The following tooltips in the "Preferences" window, cannot be translated in Transformer nor are they correctly displayed in IMT, even if they appear as translated in the relevant italian.gui.xml file:

1) "Font size in points" (x 2)

2) "Number of seconds tooltip hints will be shown before..."

What is strange is that those items don't show up either in the translation screen after loading the English gui file or in the English gui file itself. The question is, where does the program take these items from?

Paolo Cutini wrote to point out that the latest distro didn't include the latest Italian interface file. My fault -- I must have lost track among the several that he's sent as the app has been updated recently. I did a quick rebuild of 1.4.0.2 and posted it on the site to include the latest Italian gui file. The rapid installer builder is really paying dividends!

Fixed the bug reported by Paolo Cutini, and also tidied up some of the conversion XSLT (for loading/converting old files), then did a new release package. Abandoned the use of Winzip to bundle the installer; Inno can provide an icon for the executable of the installer, and all of the prefatory messages are pretty much unnecessary for a free program. This will make future releases even quicker.

Paolo Cutini reported a bug with the Create Zip Package function of IMT; if the file already exists, it adds files to the archive, instead of overwriting the archive as it should.

Checked this out, and it's a clear bug. Logged the bug on the bugs page of the site, and investigated in the code. This is the problem function, in the ZipMasterFunc.pas library:

function TufrmZipMasterFunc.ZipFiles(TheFiles: TWideStringList;

We need to amend these lines:

Archiver.ZipFileName := ZipFileName;
Archiver.AddOptions := [];

to add a file deletion:

Archiver.ZipFileName := ZipFileName;
if WidefileExists(ZipFileName) then Archiver.EraseFile(ZipFileName, htdAllowUndo);
Archiver.AddOptions := [];

I'll get this done on Monday, and release a new version.

Working on the Mariage files, I discovered an oddity in the validation of SVG code. Chris Lilley of the W3C had written to me before Christmas, pointing out that I was using svg:id attributes on rect elements, when I should be using an unqualified id attribute. He was correct; however, I've now discovered that using plain id results in a failure to validate against the SVG 1.1 schema I'm using. This schema is an XSD file generated by Trang from the W3C's official DTD; they don't provide an SVG version at all. However, our code does validate against the DTD for SVG 1.1, so it seems that it's the schema, not the XML, that's wrong; and the error seems to have been introduced by the Trang conversion. This is not a major issue, but it's annoying. I've written to Chris Lilley to ask him if there's a standard XSD release of the SVG 1.1 standard, but I'm not hopeful; we may have to try to debug the XSD file we have, and fix the problem that way.

In the process of working on the Mariage site, I discovered that changes to the executable InternalName for the installer had caused the app to stop detecting when it was opening a version 1.3 file, so it was not doing conversions from 1.3 to 1.4. Did a quick bugfix, and (thanks to the new installer setup) built a new installer without having to change anything. Updated the site, and tested the installer while updating IMT on Endive and Chicory.

Updated all the source code libraries, and added new ones for the zip functionality; updated all the Web pages; and released version 1.4.

After many years of intending to do it, I finally downloaded the ISTool set of add-ons for Inno Setup. The objective is to take advantage of the ISPP (Inno Setup Preprocessor) to automate the assignment of version info and numbering to setup files and setup GUI messages. The docs are a bit sparse for ISPP, but I eventually figured it all out, and I'm now able to do this:

• Extract complete version info from the program executable.
• Use that info to create all relevant GUI messages and numbering for the installer.
• Specify file paths once, in the header of the file, and have the rest of the script automatically populated with the right paths.
• Also get company name, publisher, app URL etc. directly from the executable.

The main value of learning how to do this is that it will make updating the installer much quicker and simpler in future; once the executable has been rebuilt with a new version number, and as long as the version info in the file is complete, the installer will use it automatically and we'll be able to build a new installer for a new release without changing the Inno Setup script at all.

A further possible benefit for the future is that there is a download dll available for ISTool, which can be called from an installer to get files directly from the Internet. This provides the promise of releasing installers which only download files which are required or have changed, reducing server load. How practical this might be for the type and scale of applications we release remains to be seen.

Started the process of adding documentation for the Zip output to the Help file. Created the topic file, and a new "What's New" file, and XIncluded them in the main file. Still have to flesh out the details and add appropriate index and glossary entries.