JSesh 8.0.8 is out!

It's a major change in JSesh code. I have been working on it for a long time, and I have spent the summer cleaning it up.

Lots of the changes are invisible to the user, but will help for the evolutions of JSesh, but there are many user visible changes I hope you will enjoy.

Video presentation of the new features

New installers

There are now two families of Macintoshes: M1 and Intel. JSesh now handle both, with a new installation system. It has allowed me to include Linux versions alongside the others.

Editing and MdC support

• A major and long awaited change : alphabetic (non-hieroglyphic) text can now be edited normally. You don' need to use the so called “mdc field” to change your latin/italic/bold text. Simply type it directly;
• A New enclosure shapes: circular fortified enclosures (bastions) are now supported.
• The use of J for yod is now a real option.
• The baseline of alphabetic text can now be chosen (in Document properties).
• Hyphenated transliterations are accepted in the hieroglyphic palette search: typing HwtHr finds Hwt-Hr (and similar). The hyphen handling was checked.
• Ecdotic marks are now grouped in submenus, which declutters the interface.
• A few more menus were turned into submenus.

Signs and fonts

• Added sign G1001; sign descriptions and the sign list updated.
• nn and nTrw fixed.
• Signs now display at the correct size in dialogs, and icon rendering in menus and lists is improved.
• Fixed spurious text in the sign palette.

Interface

• The UI language can now be selected explicitly. Go to Preferences/Other Preferences to select language.
• New look and feel (FlatLaf), with automatic choice of the Mac or generic variant.
• Arabic translation added, with better right-to-left support (probably not perfect yet).
• Labels and property names were unified across the interface.

Export

• A new JVectClipboard version fixes a rounding bug in EMF output. If you had weird rendering of EMF graphics, it should be fin now.
• Cancelling an SVG export now works properly (fix by Jocelyn1109, PR #53).

Sign Info editor

• Distributed separately (mainly for technical reasons);
• gets its own icon (it's very happy about it);
• gets a new name (JSeshSignInfo), by accident.

Sign Changes

As usual, the sign modifications between JSesh 7.9.1 and JSesh 8.0.8 are documented in the sign differences page.

Changes in JSesh API

If you use JSesh as a library, you will find that the API has changed a lot. I'm sorry about the inconvenience, but I think the new API will be much better, for future developments of JSesh, and for your own code.

At the present time, I suggest you look at the documentation included in the sources (I will update the online documentation in due time).