BlueGriffon^TM

If you don't have the technical knowledge - or the time and energy - to write your own HTML+CSS+JavaScript document template and would like to get a superbly formatted document in one click and start immediately typing in BlueGriffon, this add-on is made for you.

It downloads from our site a list of free online templates that we maintain and will of course expand over time. At the time of the release of version 1.0 of this add-on, 458 free templates are available through this add-on ! No doubt you'll find one matching your wishes or needs in the list.

You can see a preview of each template (if one is available), a live demo of each template (if one is available) and install in a single click a template in your filesystem. You can also easily and instantly search through the available templates.

Two things:

• the World Wide Web Consortium is considering "adoption" of BlueGriffon for internal use. But since the W3C uses HTTP PUT, WebDav and CVS to publish their documents, they needed an add-on to PUT their documents on w3.org. I wrote that add-on in a few hours and donated a perpetual site license for that add-on to all W3C staff. Let me know if you're interested. The add-on allows to PUT a document and all local linked resources (stylesheets, replaced elements; will deal with imported stylesheets and webfonts in a next version); it rewrites the URIs for these resources as needed to make sure the published version renders ok.
• BlueGriffon is now taught at Rutgers University !!! Woooohooo !

I am extremely happy to report that thanks to Gabor Kelemen, we now have a Hungarian language pack for BlueGriffon 1.4. First L10N contribution to this project, not a single bug, not a single issue, 100% completion. Wow. Thanks a lot Gabor !

To install the hungarian language pack (or any of BlueGriffon 1.4 language packs):

1. right-click on this link to download and save the package on your local disk
2. in BlueGriffon, select Tools > Add-ons to open the Add-ons manager
3. click on the Languages tab
4. use the wheel button at the top of the window to "Install from file" the package you downloaded at step 1
5. click OK after the delay and restart BlueGriffon
6. open the Preferences panel
7. switch to the Advanced tab
8. select "Use installed locale"
9. select "hu (Hungarian)"
10. click on the "Use language" button

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

This article is for the people who help us localizing BlueGriffon. I have a Firefox add-on made for you : L10N Checker. It can take two directories, for instance the en-US locale dir and the zh-TW locale dir and compare all dtd and properties file inside. It reports missing files on both ends, duplicate entries. It can report if a BOM marker is present in a file and if an entity is unchanged between the reference file and your localization, potentially indicating you still have some thing to translate.

Yes, I know Mozilla has tools like compare-locales and such. But these are commandline-based and I wanted something simpler giving the same results for the BlueGriffon L10N community.

After installation in Firefox >=5, you'll find the L10N Check men entry under the Tools menu.

Windows Forest, an important Japanese web magazine, just notified me BlueGriffon is nominated for the 2011 Windows Forest Awards ! If you're based in Japan, like BlueGriffon and want to express your support, please vote here !

The text-align buttons of the format toolbar in v1.3 were horked, and that was a big enough regression to make me release a fix as soon as possible. Version 1.3.1 is available immediately from the usual page. Many thanks to Charles Cooke and Pascal Myrta for the heads up.

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.