SDF 2.001: SDF Release Notes: 2.000beta9

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# 8. 2.000beta9

Enhancements | Fixes | Incompatibilities

## 8.1. Enhancements

### 8.1.1. Overview

The contrib directory now contains an SDF mode for Emacs and a rudimentary RTF to SDF converter. Like other things in the contrib directory, these are unsupported but may be useful.

The other enhancements are:

Improved documentation
Improved text tables
New filters
Citation support.

Further details are provided below.

### 8.1.2. Improved documentation

The documentation has been improved in a number of ways:

1. The SDF User Guide has been revised and updated.
2. The SDF Guru Guide now has a chapter on extending SDF.
3. The manuals provided with SDF now have an index.
4. The SDF 2.000 Migration Guide is no longer provided in the standard distribution (as it is only useful for SDF 1.x users within Mincom).

### 8.1.3. Improved text tables

Thanks to Tim MacKenzie (Tim.MacKenzie@fulcum.com.au): tables output in txt format have been improved:

- all cells are now word wrapped (not just the last one in each row)
- cell alignment is now supported
- Line paragraph styles within cells are now supported
- heading underlining has been improved.

### 8.1.4. New filters

Thanks to Tim Hudson (tjh@cryptsoft.com), a number of new filters are now available:

Name | Description
built-in: |
nofill | format a set of lines
simple | generic filter for building other filters
defines.sdm: |
product_defines | define products and variables for each
section_defines | define section names as variables
testcase.sdm: |
testcases | collect testcases from A3s into a table at the end of document

### 8.1.5. Citation support

References can now be easily numbered and the numbers can be inserted in paragraph text. The new features which make this possible are:

- the references class now supports a Cite attribute which produces a string of the form [n]
- the REF phrase style now supports a cite attribute which inserts the reference number using the syntax [n].

For example:

    H1: References

    !include "doc.reg"; references; columns='Cite,Document'

    H1: Some heading

    Refer to {{REF[cite]ABC}} and {{REF[cite]ME2}}.

If you want to put the reference table at the back of the document, it is necessary to forward declare which documents will be cited by using the cited parameter of the references filter. The table of cited references can then be built later by using the catalog macro. For example:

    !include "doc.reg"; references; cited

    H1: Some heading

    Refer to {{REF[cite]ABC}} and {{REF[cite]ME2}}.

    H1: References

    !catalog references 'cited'; columns='Cite,Document'

## 8.2. Fixes

FrameMaker 4.x compatibility has been improved thanks to a patch from Tim MacKenzie (Tim.MacKenzie@fulcum.com.au).

The document control section (on the inside of the front cover) of project documents has been improved. (In fact, it is now much easier to customise output of the build_title macro.)

The about filter was fixed to work better with documents formatted using the infomap look.

For Windows 3.x/MS-DOS users:

- the sdftest.bat file has been fixed
- the sdfget.bat file has been added.

Date formatting for years >= 2000 has been fixed.

## 8.3. Incompatibilities

None.