Official Express 2.6 Beta thread

[martin]

The problem with consolidating the "Opening Document" and "Typesetting" progress bars is that you don't know how long the second phase is going to take until the first is completed. We could estimate, but the bar might fill up at different speeds depending on what phase was being worked on, making it less useful IMO.

As for what the phases mean:

Opening Document: this is the part where we read and translate the underlying document. Eg: we parse the RTF and create our own internal data structures from it.

Typesetting: here we calculate where each bit of text will appear on the page. Eg: placing lines of text on top of one another, adding new pages, deciding if a footnote will fit on a particular page, etc.

[midwinter]

I'd like to second (third? fourth?) the call to consolidate the progress bars. I understand what Martin is saying, but I wonder if, to a regular joe's eyes, the register as a) confusing popups or b) just confusing or c) error messages or something that's wrong or d) a tease, since you watch one and get all excited to be working in NWE and then BAM! another progress bar appears.

I'd like to see a single progress bar with a header indicating what it's doing. If it slows down a little bit during phase two, that's fine.

[Ryan]

Um, not that I think it's a big deal, but while we're talking about it, I'll throw my chips in with the rest of the folks. Two separate progress bars is mildly irritating. One sounds nice.

And we're used to progress bars that sometimes slow down or speed up. What, are progress bars supposed to accurately represent progress or something?

[ninjagame]

The NWE 2.6beta2 surely takes its time "Loading fonts" upon startup and I hope that will get fixed somehow. (Could be due to the new WYSIWYG feature, though...) But frankly speaking, it doesn't bother me as much as it seems to be bothering others.
Anyway - I got a positive surprise as well: It seems that now a document opens with the cursor at the point I left it - which is VERY comfortable! Thx to the NWE gang!
May I get my New Year's wish in once more? Might there some day be a "soft hyphenation" feature...?
Bottom line: You're on a good way! Keep it up!

ninjagame

[martin]

From the number of replies here it seems that consolidating the progress bars is worth the effort, even if it is not entirely accurate. I don't know that we'll be able to make the change in time for 2.6, but consider it added to "the list".

[martin]

The NWE 2.6beta2 surely takes its time "Loading fonts" upon startup and I hope that will get fixed somehow. (Could be due to the new WYSIWYG feature, though...)

This is indeed due to the WYSIWYG font menu feature and I wouldn't expect the speed to improve much between now and release. If you find the extra launch time to be too annoying you can turn off WYSIWYG fonts in the General preferences.

I should note that the first time you launch Express 2.6 (or any of the betas) this "Loading Fonts" phase takes longer than subsequent launches. After the first launch some information is cached.

[Jzents]

I find it somewhat remarkable that we just spent several posts on what strikes me as horribly trivial. The ruler bug I gather is not fixed, I have a large problem with the tiered outline feature (I have submitted a bug) and we are worring about the progress bars on the opening? Nisus is a good product, but not so good that we can waste their time on trivial stuff like that! There are more serious bugs to be fried in 2.6 than this progress bars issue. I hope I do not offend someone, I am sure nobody was trying to waste time, but I had to say what I thought!

[martin]

Beta three is available for download. The more significant fixes are:

- Fixed crashes when saving files or opening preferences for Panther users.
- Another attempt to fix the ruler updating bug.

And Jzents, don't worry, we're going to fix those kinds of bugs before we do more trivial things like combining progress bars. I'm looking into the list styles bug you submitted feedback for right now.

[cgc]

I find it somewhat remarkable that we just spent several posts on what strikes me as horribly trivial. The ruler bug I gather is not fixed, I have a large problem with the tiered outline feature (I have submitted a bug) and we are worring about the progress bars on the opening? Nisus is a good product, but not so good that we can waste their time on trivial stuff like that! There are more serious bugs to be fried in 2.6 than this progress bars issue. I hope I do not offend someone, I am sure nobody was trying to waste time, but I had to say what I thought!

While we're pointing things out, like the progress bars, we're not telling Nisus how to stratify/prioritize tasks. As long as it's adressed sometime in the future we can wait. I too prefer bug killing and feature upgrades, but in their massive amount of free time, I'm sure they can combine two progress bars

[jf arotxa]

Nice update. The ruler bug seems to be gone.

[cgc]

I don't see the up/down arrows in the font sidebar in BW 2.6b3.

[martin]

Here's beta 4. Not too many changes for this one- mainly just fixing the early expiration of beta 3.

[Chris]

Still no ability to automatically create a table of content? Oh well, back to Word for me … *sigh*

[martin]

Sorry Chris, but you'll have to wait for a major release for such a large feature.

[joehardy]

Sorry Chris, but you'll have to wait for a major release for such a large feature.

And once that comes, NWE will have just about everything I need.