SDF 2.000: SDF Release Notes: 2.000beta5

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# 17. 2.000beta5

Enhancements | General Fixes | HTML Fixes | HLP Fixes | Incompatibilities

## 17.1. Enhancements

### 17.1.1. Performance

Performance is now 2-3 times faster for most documents. There is still some work to do here, but the performance is now "respectable" (rather than "disappointing").

### 17.1.2. Perl 5

This release has been tested with Perl 5.002 and is configured to use it, by default. However:

- the odd "eval" buglet still (randomly?) appears when using Perl 5
- the mif2rtf script has not been tested.

If you wish to use Perl 4 instead, you will need to change the top line of the scripts in the `bin` directory after installing SDF.

### 17.1.3. Newsletters

There is now a new style called newsletter.

The title filter now supports a toc parameter for specifying a table of contents. For example:

    !block title; toc=$var{'OPT_TARGET'} eq 'html' ? 2 : 0
    Name    Value
    Title   My Newsletter
    Editor  Me
    !endblock

This produces a title block for a newsletter and only gives it a table of contents when the target is HTML.

### 17.1.4. Pre-Filtering

sdfcvt's -p option prefilters the input file for each argument. The (optional) parameter is the filter to use. For example:

            sdfcvt -ptable mytable.tbl

is equivalent to executing sdfcvt on a file which only contains:

            !include "mytable.pl"; table

File extensions can be mapped to filters in `sdfcvt.ini`. For example, `sdfcvt.ini` now contains the following:

    [PreFilters]
    Name    Aliases     Module
    table   tbl
    module  sdm,sde     frmodule

As tbl is mapped to table, creating nicely formatted tables is now quite easy. For example:

            sdfcvt -p -aformat='15,75,10' mytable.tbl

(The -a option can be used to specify prefilter parameters.)

For a given prefilter, a module can be configured in `sdfcvt.ini` to be loaded before the filter is applied. As a result, it's possible to do really clever things via autoloaded filters. Examples include:

- automatically documenting SDF modules
- converting other formats to SDF on the fly.

For example, the following command will build the reference documentation for a SDF module in HTML (real soon now):

     sdfcvt +sdf2html -p abc.sdm

## 17.2. General Fixes

The sdf2txt stuff now works.

## 17.3. HTML Fixes

Empty cells now look better. (This was supposed to be fixed by the previous release but I had missed a few.)

Paragraphs with multiple anchors are now handled better (although the odd problem probably remains with this stuff).

If a table of contents is requested and SDF doesn't know the "right" place for it, it is now prepended (rather than being dumped).

Title blocks for correspondence look much better now.

## 17.4. HLP Fixes

Absolute path names for libraries now correctly go into HPJ files. / characters are now also mapped to \ characters.

Title blocks for correspondence look much better now.

## 17.5. Incompatibilities

None.

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