[Ipe-announce] Ipe 7.1.7 available

[Otfried Cheong]

Ipe 7.1.7 is now available on the Ipe webpage, http://ipe7.sf.net.

There were a large number of changes, and therefore a large potential
for bugs.  

Use with care, and enjoy!
     Otfried

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Ipe 7.1.7 (2015-02-23)

 * Fifi shape and color now depends on the context: whether snapping
   to a vertex, boundary, the grid, etc.  When no snapping occurs,
   Fifi is not drawn at all.

 * The definition of B-splines has changed.  For reasons lost in the
   mist of time, Ipe has for many years used an incorrect definition
   of uniform B-splines, which handled the boundary conditions
   wrongly. In particular, the first and final segment of a spline was
   always a straight segment. 

   This has now been fixed, and the line/spline tools from now on
   create correct uniform B-splines.  In particular, splines with four
   control points are now identical to cubic Bezier segments.  As a
   generalization, a spline with three control points generates a
   quadratic Bezier segment, so the special keys 'q' and 'c' in the
   line tool are now longer needed.

   One benefit of this change is that it is now possible to cut
   B-splines (both open and closed) at any knot value, so that splines
   can be cut without first decomposing them entirely into Bezier
   curves. 

   Splines created with older versions of Ipe continue to work as
   before and can still be edited.  They are now called "old splines".

   As a result, the Ipe file format version was updated to 70107.
   Older versions of Ipe will not read files created with Ipe 7.1.7.

 * Separate snap mode for snapping to "control points".  These are the
   control points of splines, but also the centers of
   ellipses/circles/arcs, the corners of images, and the corners and
   reference point of text objects.

 * The midpoint of every straight segment is now also a snap point
   (when control point snapping is on).

 * When drawing a polyline or spline object, the previous segments of
   the object being drawn are now already magnetic and can be snapped
   to.  This feature was actually used in several snapping examples in
   the manual, but didn't work since Ipe 7.0.0.

 * A left double-click can now be used to terminate a path object
   instead of a right click.

 * Windows binaries now use a native UI without Qt.

 * On Windows, can now use two-finger touch gestures for pan and zoom.
   They work even in the middle of drawing an object with the mouse or
   the pen.

 * The paste actions (Ctrl+V) will now create an image object if the
   clipboard contains a bitmap (this function used to be "Insert image
   from clipboard").

 * When selecting objects by dragging a rectangle, select all objects
   included in the rectangle when dragging is from left to right,
   select all objects intersecting the rectangle when dragging is from
   right to left.

 * Windows shell no longer pops up when running Latex (feature #2).

 * Abort button for current drawing operation (useful on tablet
   computers without Escape key).

 * Focus now on text field in text creation dialogs.

 * When an external editor is defined, the dialog displaying the Latex
   error log now offers to show the Latex source used by Ipe (feature
   #24). 

 * Changed file extension of dynamic libraries to .dylib on Mac OS X
   (feature #20).

 * Charset support for Latex conversion now supported on Windows.

 * Static member function "selectPageOrView" moved from "PageSelector"
   to "CanvasBase".  "PageSelector" is now considered an internal
   class and should not be used by external code (it doesn't even
   exist in Windows code).

 * Developer menu with useful functions for customizing ipelets: reload
   all ipelets (this is useful when working on an ipelet), list all
   the keyboard shortcuts, check if there are any duplicate shortcuts
   defined.  The developer menu needs to be enabled by setting
   prefs.developer.

 * "Insert image" moved into Ipe program itself instead of an ipelet,
   now implemented using turbojpeg and libpng libraries instead of Qt.

 * Fixed creation of arc defined by three collinear points.

 * Lua bindings for: (1) getting gradient from a stylesheet; (2)
   creating gradients, tilings, and effects through an XML string; (3)
   removing definitions of symbolic names from a stylesheet.

 * In "Save as" file dialog, start with the current filename (feature
   #22). 

 * Fixed missed intersection points between splines and
   splines/segments (bug #8).

 * Unused arguments of Object::setAttribute removed.

 * Fixed crash when snapping to the intersection of two parallel lines
   (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=728479).

 * Changed default "Save as" destination on Windows to something more
   useful. 

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