BlueGriffon^TM

A preview of forthcoming BlueGriffon 1.4 is now available. We still miss some localization strings for 1.4 and if you think you can help, please take a look at this page.

Here's the changelog for 1.4 from 1.3.1, the important items show a disc instead of an empty circle:

• hidden preference bluegriffon.defaults.forceLF to force saving documents into Unix mode (carriage returns are one LF). To enable that, open the Preferences, select the Advanced panel and open the configuration editor. Right-click in the main area and select New > Boolean. Enter the name of the new preference and set it to true. To revert to the original platform-dependant behaviour, reset the property or turn it to false. UI for this will be added for v1.5.
• switching to MAR files for updates
• Tip of the Day (the tips themselves are not ready yet)
• use standard descriptors for ltr and rtl; b=287
• automatic detection of changes in external files linked into documents edited by BlueGriffon; b=325
• wrong mimetypes switching to source view
• get rid of duplicate anchors in Link Insertion dialog
• force reload stylesheets if they were edited
• no check if ID already given in CSS Properties panel; b=194
• Invalid class or ID in the CSS Properties panel freezes the app; b=167
• Table properties dialog controls can show NaN; b=336
• CSS Colors were always added as rgb() Values; b=97
• Don't remove empty divs switching back from source to wysiwyg view; b=261
• CodeMirror now used for all source views instead of Ace
• Script Editor was always displayed in en-US
• Insert > Stylesheets moved to Panels > Stylesheets.
• Panels > Stylesheets now offers to edit embedded and local stylesheets through CodeMirror
• folding and XML parsing error visibility added to Source View
• folding and JS syntax error added to Script Editor (uses Reflect)
• folding added to Stylesheets Editor
• new table cells should not get vertical-align:top; b=314
• class and aria role does not apply correctly to multiple td/th selection; b=329
• don't use the width attribute on tables in html5; b=313
• Format menu partially horked; b=312
• cannot select/copy/paste select elements; b=331
• Removing last class leaves an empty class attribute; b=320
• impossible to create an attributeless hr element; b=322
• a lot of minor fixes

• new table cells should not get vertical-align:top; b=314
• class and aria role does not apply correctly to multiple td/th selection; b=329
• don't use the width attribute on tables in html5; b=313
• Format menu partially horked; b=312
• cannot select/copy/paste select elements; b=331
• Removing last class leaves an empty class attribute; b=320
• impossible to create an attributeless hr element; b=322

BlueGriffon v1.3 will have a much nicer structure bar, something I have always wanted to do but never had time for in the past. Of course, it also works fine in right-to-left environments like Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi.

Our next BlueGriffon add-on will be a Mobile Previewer... You'll be able to check if your layout (fluid, responsive or whatever) beautifully fits on a small screen, a medium screen or even a gigantic screen. CSS Media Queries and Meta Viewport supported.

Charles McCathieNevile (aka chaals, Chief Standards Officer of Opera) pinged me a while ago because he wanted to create his own keyboard shortcuts inside BlueGriffon. As far as I know, such a feature is extremely rare in the Mozilla xulrunner-based world. But I agreed it was a legitimate request in an editing environment...

I'm almost done. There will in version 1.3 of BlueGriffon a new preference panel allowing to tweak all keyboard shortcuts, add a shortcut to a menu item or toolbar item having no shortcut yet, delete an existing shortcut. On Mac, it's a bit more complex than on Windows and Linux because of the hidden window and the OS X-managed toolbar. But it already works.

I have to iron a bit things, handle persistency across sessions (a non issue, really), localize properly all strings and messages through entities and properties and it will hit a subversion repository near you. Possibly a first in the Mozilla world.

Now chaals, happy ?

I'm currently working on the content serializer of Gecko and the layer living above it in BlueGriffon to solve a big issue Asian text authors have with BlueGriffon: the current version wraps the contents of the source view by default, something that is not acceptable for some asian writing scripts. I'm almost done and it's about to land on the trunk. The new Preferences panel will show:

For the time being, the languages exclusion pref looks at the document's language. I am currently hacking the serializer to let it use that preference on a per-element basis, meaning you will be able to wrap the source of a document in english letting for instance the japanese prose (tagged as such with a lang or xml:lang attribute) unwrapped

Web developers like ColorZilla. ColorZilla is great, really great. But it has one issue: it's able to pick a color only inside the browser window, not anywhere on the screen or even the multiple screens you have. Since designers work with multiple types of sources, it is often necessary to get a color from outside the browser window and in that case ColorZilla can't help...

I was not really fond of writing a ColorZilla-like add-on for BlueGriffon myself since Mac OS X has /Applications/Utilities/DigitalColor\ Meter.app and my primary platform is OS X... But then I got an interesting message from a BlueGriffon user containing good, even very good I must say, arguments in favor of such an add-on. So I spent a few hours (roughly three) on it and here is the result. Honestly I already like it. It's not ironed yet and works only on OS X for the time being but the screenshot below will show you the best part of it : it works anywhere on all screens attached to your computer (see the crosshair cursor in the BlueGriffonEpubEdition icon on OS X desktop) ...

I think I can also make it work on Windows and Linux. And of course, it will be well integrated with the colorpicker in BlueGriffon. Stay tuned

Update: the add-on now adds a new EyeDropper button to the color picker and is fully functional on OS X, Linux and Windows. Yay ! Will be released with forthcoming BlueGriffon 1.2.

Yay! BlueGriffon now has basic autocompletion for all HTML5 tag names in its Source View (revision 767). Click on the thumbnail below to see a larger image.

Just for your information, BlueGriffon EPUB Edition will create/edit/save not only EPUB 2 ebooks but also EPUB 3 ebooks...