[Ipe-announce] Ipe preview 15 available

[Otfried Cheong]

For an important presentation recently I made my first serious Ipe
presentation, and found preview 14 quite inconvenient for doing
so. Before actually making my presentation, I've therefore added some
features to Ipe that make presentation-making much more convenient.

The main new features are 

 * One-button creation of text objects that span the page horizontally
   (F10)

 * Support for incrementally built-up pages by having access to
   "views" (the multiple steps of a page presentation) in the main Ipe
   UI.  The special view/page presentation dialog is still there, but
   not often needed.

See below for many other changes.

As an example, you can have a look at my presentation at

   http://ipe.compgeom.org/area-slides.pdf

My apologies to those of you who just finished making their
presentations for SoCG...

Enjoy,
  Otfried

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Ipe 6.0 preview 15 (2004-06-04)

 * Fixed handling of transformation matrix in Pdftoipe.  Pdftoipe
   is now actually considered supported.

 * Added option -math to pdftoipe.  With this option, all text objects
   are turned into math formulas.

 * Color changes in text objects (e.g. made using \textcolor) and
   quotient bars are now shown on screen.

 * Views (that is, page views) are now fully integrated in Ipe's main
   user interface. They are easier to create and maintain.

 * Views keep a record of the active layer, so that switching back to
   a view to edit it makes objects go in the right layer (usually).

 * Pressing the right mouse button in the layer list opens a context
   menu.

 * Changed handling of style-sheet stretching of text objects.  The
   width/depth/height of text objects now correctly reflects this
   stretching, and when creating a minipage object, the user drags out
   the actual desired width.

   Unfortunately, this changes the semantics of Ipe documents!  To
   make it possible to do this change automatically, the style sheet
   tag has been renamed from <textmatrix> to <textstretch> (with
   slightly changed syntax, see the manual).  Currently, a simple
   automatic conversion is done: if the style sheet contains ANY
   textmatrix tag, the conversion factor is applied to the width of
   ALL text objects in the document.

 * Simple background shadings are now possible using <shading> in a
   style sheet.

 * Two new types of text objects defined.  They are just variants of
   label and minipage.  A new function 'Insert text object' creates
   textbox objects with fixed left and right margins (set in the style
   sheet).

 * Move-to-back function now inserts in front of anything in
   background layer.

 * Renamed the method NotifyStyle to CheckStyle.

 * Added a simple clipping ipelet (clips only marks and line segments
   to a convex polygon - just about enough to be useful for clipping
   Voronoi diagrams).

 * Fixed bug #42 (linewidth could be null in IpeBBoxPainter).

 * Ipe remembers file format used for saving.

 * Latex style files are now searched for both in the current
   directory and in the directory containing the Ipe document.

 * Command line option -geom WxH+X+Y (note the slight difference to
   X11, where the option is '-geometry').  Smarter zoom on opening
   documents.

 * Simplified handling of locked layers.  A locked layer cannot be
   made the active layer now.

 * Each page stores the grid size used to create it.

 * Only one (global) media size per Ipe document.

 * Refactored Ipe program into separate model/canvas library.
   The Ipe canvas can be reused by programs wishing to display Ipe
   data.

 * Ipe file format conversion functionality (-topng, -topdf etc) has
   been moved into a separate program "ipetoipe".

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