JGsoft Newsfeed

Updated: HelpScribble 7.7.4

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:00:00 +0700

HelpScribble 7.7.4 is now available for download. This version fixes a few issues that we missed in 7.7.3 last month.

The first time you try to use the spell checker, HelpScribble will ask you to download spell check dictionaries in on or more languages. The download mechanism that's built into HelpScribble was broken in version 7.7.3.

With the command line HelpScr.exe helpfile.hsc /c /q you can tell HelpScribble to compile helpfile.hsc and automatically close on successful compilation. You can use this to make compiling your help file part of an automated build process. In version 7.7.3, the /q parameter would cause an access violation error. The help file was still compiled correctly, but HelpScribble would not shut down automatically.

An older bug was also fixed. The Renumber Topics item in the Project menu would crash on invalid {linkID} and {button} tags. These tags use topic numbers to add links and buttons to your help topics. The Renumber Topics function updates those tags when it renumbers the topics the tags point to. Invalid tags are now be ignored.

If you have already purchased helpscribble, you can download this update for free.
Buy helpscribble now.
Complete version history.

Tips & Ticks: Copy and Paste in Hexadecimal Mode

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:00:00 +0700

When editing a file in hexadecimal mode, EditPad Pro's copy-and-paste intelligently changes its behavior depending on whether the cursor is in the hexadecimal section or ASCII section. You can directly copy and paste the hexadecimal representation as well as the actual bytes.

When you copy and paste between two files that you're editing in hexadecimal mode in EditPad Pro, the position of the cursor doesn't matter. EditPad Pro always pastes the actual bytes that you copied.

The position of the cursor matters when you copy and paste between a file you're editing in hexadecimal mode, and another which you're editing in text mode. It also matters when you copy and paste between a file you're editing in EditPad Pro, and a file you're editing in another application. It doesn't matter if the other application is a text editor, hex editor, or something else entirely. Microsoft Windows does not provide a standard clipboard format for bytes in a hex editor. When you copy and paste between two different hex editors, it's always text that gets transferred by the clipboard.

When copying in EditPad Pro with the cursor in the hexadecimal section, EditPad will place the hexadecimal representation on the clipboard. E.g. when selecting the four bytes "test", "74657374" will be copied to the clipboard. If the cursor is in the ASCII section, the actual bytes will be copied to the clipboard, e.g. "test". When you paste into a file in EditPad that you're editing in text mode, "74657374" or "test" will be pasted, depending on how you copied it. When pasting into another application, the application will see "74657374" or "test" on the clipboard, depending on how you copied it in EditPad Pro. If the other application is a hex editor, it may or may not interpret "74657374" to be the same as "test".

If you copy "test" to the clipboard from a file you're editing in text mode in EditPad, or if another application placed "test" on the clipboard, EditPad Pro will always paste the four bytes "test", even when the cursor is in the hexadecimal section. The position only matters when you copy "74657374" from a text file, or if another application places "74657374" on the clipboard. If the cursor is in the hexadecimal section, EditPad will interpret "74657374" as four bytes "test". "74 65 73 74" will appear in the hex section, and "test" in the ASCII section. If you paste "74657374" with the cursor in the ASCII section, then EditPad Pro will paste the eight bytes "74657374". "74657374" will appear in the ASCII section, and "37 34 36 35 37 33 37 34" in the hexadecimal section.

When you read my explanation like this, it may all seem a little confusing. But actually, once you know to pay attention to whether the cursor is in the hexadecimal or ASCII section, it all works very naturally. Just hit the Tab key on your keyboard to flip the cursor between hex and ASCII.

Updated: PowerGREP 3.5.0

Tue, 13 May 2008 18:00:00 +0700

PowerGREP 3.5.0 is now available for download. This is a must-have release if you search through Office 2007 or OpenOffice XML-based formats, or if you search using lists of thousands of search terms.

Microsoft Office 2007 uses new file formats with .docx, .xlsx and .pptx extensions. Technically, these files are .zip archives that contain a number of .xml files and assorted files. OpenOffice uses the OpenDocument Format. ODF files are also .zip archives containing .xml and assorted files, though the XML is not compatible with Microsoft's. If you click on an MS Office 2007 or OpenOffice file in PowerGREP, you'll see that you can expand it just like a .zip archive. The XML files inside are what PowerGREP actually searches through. PowerGREP has had this ability since version 3.4.0.

Though .docx files are technically .zip archives, conceptually they are document files just like Word documents saved in the old binary .doc format. PowerGREP has to treat them differently. PowerGREP treats .zip archives as (compressed) folders, but .docx files as (compound) document files. The Search Archives item in the File Selector menu does not affect Office 2007 files. PowerGREP 3.4.x already did this.

What did not work correctly in PowerGREP 3.4.x was that PowerGREP did not treat the .docx file as a single file when applying the target and backup options you set on the Action tab. E.g. if you set backups to be created with a .bak extension in the same folder as the original, and your action modifies the file word\document.xml inside MyDocument.docx, then the backup would be saved as word\document.xml.bak inside MyDocument.docx. Opening the modified MyDocument.docx caused Word 2007 to complain that MyDocument.docx is corrupted, due to the extraneous word\document.xml.bak file.

PowerGREP 3.5.0 correctly applies backup options to the whole .docx file. Using the same example, PowerGREP 3.5.0 backs up MyDocument.docx as a whole to MyDocument.docx.bak. Then PowerGREP makes your replacements in word\document.xml inside MyDocument.docx. Word 2007 will open the modified MyDocument.docx without complaint.

When executing a "find files" action, PowerGREP now lists only the .docx file itself, rather than all the .xml files it contains. This is true whether you're using a search text or not.

PowerGREP's behavior when dealing with .zip archives is unchanged. When modifying text.txt inside archive.zip, the backup text.txt.bak is created inside archive.zip. PowerGREP treats archive.zip as a (compressed) folder. A "find files" action still lists all files inside the .zip archive rather than the .zip archive itself. The only exception is finding files without a search term, and Search Archives turned off. Then the .zip files themselves are listed.

PowerGREP 3.5.0 includes two major improvements that result in significantly improved performance when searching using a list of thousands of search terms. The "list of literal text" and "delimited literal text" search types are now faster than the "list of regular expressions" and "delimited regular expressions" search types when the option "non-overlapping search" is turned on. You won't notice the difference when searching for a handful of items. But with thousands of search terms, searching for literal text is now significantly faster than in previous versions of PowerGREP.

PowerGREP 3.5.0 uses significantly less memory when searching for thousands of search terms. This equally affects literal text and regular expression searches. In situations where the list of search terms would produce tens of thousands or more search matches, PowerGREP 3.5.0 happily run the search, while previous versions would run out of memory. The Results|Save command produces much smaller .pgr files in this situation.

Because of these changes, earlier versions of PowerGREP cannot open files saved with PowerGREP 3.5.0. PowerGREP 3.5.0 naturally opens files saved with earlier versions just fine.

A number of other minor bugs were fixed as well. Of note is that PowerGREP is now smarter about starting and stopping the conversion manager. This is a background process for converting proprietary file formats like .doc and .pdf to text, prior to searching. Please check the version history on PowerGREP's web site for a complete list of fixes and improvements.

If you have already purchased PowerGREP, you can download this free update for free.
Upgrade from PowerGREP 2.x to 3.x.
Buy PowerGREP now.
Complete Version History.

Tips & Tricks: Validate XML Files in EditPad Pro

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:00:00 +0700

EditPad Pro's Tools menu provides lots of flexible options for invoking external applications on the files you're editing. A download with bunch of example tool configurations is available on EditPad's web site.

Today I've added the cleverly named XMLValidatorTool.exe. This is a small console application that uses the .NET framework's XML classes to validate an XML file. It requires version 1.1 or later of the .NET framework to run. C# code is included. You can import the two .ini files via Tools|Configure Tools. You'll have to edit them to point them to the location of XMLValidatorTool.exe. You'll also have to point the one using a schema to the schema file you want to use. Hold down Ctrl while clicking on the New button in the tool configuration to clone it. That way you can easily add configurations for multiple schemas. The XMLValidatorTool.jgcscs file is a syntax coloring scheme that highlights the output from XMLValidatorTool.exe.

New: Micro-ISV.asia

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:00:00 +0700

Since you're reading the Just Great Software newsfeed, you're likely already familiar with my business and its products. But unless you're running your own Micro-ISV, you probably don't know much about what goes on behind the scenes. If you're curious about that, feel free to subscribe to my (Jan Goyvaerts) new blog: Micro-ISV.asia.

Over eight years of running my own small software business, I’ve gained quite a bit of experience in developing and publishing software. I have shared some of my opinions over the years in newsgroups, at conferences and on my old blog. But I’ve never written about the wonderful world of independent software development with any consistency. This new blog fixes that.

At Micro-ISV.asia I’ll publish my opinions about current events and best practices for Micro-ISVs, and write about stuff I’m cooking up myself at Just Great Software. The main audience for this blog are obviously all the other Micro-ISVs out there, people who are thinking about starting their own software business, as well as people with general interest in the industry.

If you’re a Just Great Software customer, this blog will give you a glimpse inside the sausage factory. But for regular product updates, keep your subscription to the Just Great Software newsfeed which you are reading right now.

Updated: EditPad Lite and Pro in French

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 18:00:00 +0700

Thanks to the hard work of Pietro Colok of Colok Traductions, the latest versions of EditPad Lite and Pro are now available in the French language. If you have previously purchased EditPad Pro 6, you can download the French version (or any other language version) with the user ID you already have.

As a small company, we do not have the resources to translate our software into many languages. We therefore rely on volunteers to make the translations for us. If you would like to translate EditPad into your language, please send a note to the EditPad technical support address.

Updated: RegexBuddy 3.1.1

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 18:00:00 +0700

RegexBuddy 3.1.1 is now available for download. This free update brings quite a number of fixes and improvements.

Two new command line parameters -flavor and -flavorreplace allow you to specify the flavor that RegexBuddy should default to. These parameters are intended to be used with the -getfromclipboard parameter. E.g. RegexBuddy.exe -getfromclipboard -flavor pcre -string c makes RegexBuddy treat the text on the clipboard as a PCRE regex formatted as a C or C++ string.

RegexBuddy's installer can now install RegexBuddy directly onto a removable drive. Simply click the Create Portable Installation button and follow the steps. The Install on Removable Drive item in the Help was renamed to Create Portable Installation for consistency. So if you only use RegexBuddy in a portable manner, you can now install it directly that way. If you run it both off your hard disk and off a removable device, you can still use the item in the Help menu to copy your installation.

On the Use tab, you can now select wxWidgets among the languages. This template generates C++ source code snippets that use the wxRegEx class from the wxWidgets library. This class encapsulates the ARE engine originally developed for Tcl. This regex flavor is labeled Tcl ARE in RegexBuddy. The PHP preg template has a new function to search-and-replace through a string using the preg_replace_callback() function.

The HTML export on the Create tab was improved. The resulting HTML now uses a bit of JavaScript to resize the regex tree, so everything will fit into the browser window. Free-spacing regular expressions are now exported with their spacing intact as well. On the Test tab, the status of the "update automatically" setting is now remembered when the option to preserve the test subject is turned on in the preferences. The command last used is not remembered, so you still need to select a command like List All for automatic updating to begin. On the Use tab, backslashes that needlessly escape literal characters such as % are now automatically stripped from the regular expression in the source code snippet. This makes sure your source code isn't needlessly infested with an army of backslashes when those needless backslashes are doubled-up to format your regex as a string.

Speaking of backslashes, two bugs involving them were fixed. If a regular expression contained an escaped forward slash, RegexBuddy escaped the backslash when formatting the regex as a JavaScript or Ruby // operator. RegexBuddy did not emulate the fact that the .NET engine treats \_ as an error. Most regex flavors treat escaped letters that don't form a metacharacter as an error, but treat an escaped underscore as a literal. The .NET flavor treats the underscore like a letter.

Other flavor-specific bugs were fixed as well. RegexBuddy required all literal hyphens inside character classes to be escaped for flavors that treat [\d-z] as an error (since 3.0.4). This was overly restrictive. E.g. [---] is still valid with these flavors. For Perl and Python, which only support fixed-length lookbehind, RegexBuddy now treats alternation inside lookbehind as an error, like Perl and Python do. Python and PCRE do not allow two named capturing groups to use the same name, unlike the .NET and JGsoft flavors. RegexBuddy now emulates this restriction for Python and PCRE. The Alternation item in the Insert Token menu was disabled for the GNU BRE flavor, which supports alternation through \|.

RegexBuddy's own regex engine now handles certain corner cases better. \X to match a Unicode grapheme was not backtracked properly, causing a regex like \X+ a to fail on graphemes consisting of more than one Unicode code point. This could only happen on Unicode files that use combining marks, which is rare. A regex that started with a lookbehind immediately followed by an infinitely repeated dot would fail to match on the Test tab if "dot matches newlines" is on. Conditionals referencing a capturing group defined after the conditional and without a "then" part did not work correctly (new feature in 3.1.0). Mode modifiers using the (?i) syntax did not work correctly inside lookaround. RegexBuddy's regex engine did not detect catastrophic backtracking when the regex (a|aa)+b is applied to a long string of "a" characters.

Several fixes were made to the Test tab. If a regex started with consecutive literal characters, like bbc or b{2}c, RegexBuddy would match them incorrectly if the test subject used a character encoding that uses a variable number of bytes per character (like UTF-8 or DBCS). List All Group Matches in Columns did not indicate named capturing groups in the header. RegexBuddy would sometimes lock up when editing the test subject while a "list all" or similar command was still busy with the test subject. Testing a regex with an empty alternative like one||three caused an error about an empty alternative. Though empty alternatives don't make sense, they're not an error. The Create tab and syntax highlighting will still show a warning.

If you have already purchased or upgraded to RegexBuddy 3, you can download this free update for free.
If you own RegexBuddy 2, you can upgrade to version 3 at a special price.
Buy RegexBuddy now.
Complete Version History.

Three Great Fonts for Programmers

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:42:15 +0700

On EditPad Pro's web site, you can now find a selection of three great fonts for programmers that you can use with EditPad or any application where you'd like to use a monospaced font to make columns line up nicely. The page also explains what makes these fonts great, so you know what to look for if you want to compare other fonts.

New: Regex Guru

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:00:00 +0700

I've started a new blog: Regex Guru. I have been blogging for some time, but never about regular expressions. This blog fixes that.

I will continue to expand the www.regular-expressions.info site. Tutorial and reference articles will get a temporary place on that site. News articles and information with an expiration date will go on the blog. The blog will also act as a “what’s new” feed for the regexp.info site. Talk about my own endeavors with regular expressions and updates on RegexBuddy and PowerGREP will also be confined to the blog (and their respective product web sites).

So who should subscribe to this blog? Anyone who wants to learn more about regular expressions! If you’re new to regexes, you should start with my regular expression tutorial. Articles in this blog will assume you’re familiar with all the concepts explained in the tutorial. After that, this blog will keep you up-to-date.

If you’re an expert on regexes, this blog will help you stay on top of your game. Regular expressions are everywhere these days. Though they have been around longer than I have been alive, they continue to evolve. In various inconsistent and confusing ways, I’m sad to say.

Updated: EditPad Lite and Pro 6.4.1

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:00:00 +0700

EditPad Lite and Pro version 6.4.1 are now available for download. This release fixes a few issues we missed in 6.4.0.

On the Editor tab in the file type configuration, the spinner buttons were misplaced. This made it impossible to change their settings. Dragging tabs caused an access violation if the option to show an image indicating the file type on tabs was disabled in Options, Preferences, Tabs.

A few minor older bugs were fixed as well. You can find a complete list in the version history on EditPad's web site.

If you already purchased EditPad Pro 6.x.x, you can download this minor upgrade for free.
If you have EditPad Pro 4 or 5, you can upgrade to version 6 at a special price.
Buy EditPad Pro now.
Download EditPad Lite.
Download the U3 edition of EditPad Lite and Pro.
Complete version history.

Updated: JGFNSE 1.1.2

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 +0700

If you own EditPad Pro 6, you can now download version 1.1.2 of the JGsoft File Navigation Scheme Editor. This is the tool that you can use to create your own file navigation schemes. You can select them in Options, Configure File Types, Syntax & Navigation. A file navigation scheme is needed to bring the File Navigator in the View menu to life.

The installer now shows a Create Portable Installation button in the welcome screen. If you have installed EditPad Pro on a removable drive, you can use this button to install the file navigation scheme editor along with it. There's no way to do this from the application itself, like you can in EditPad. You have to use the installer. The help file is now provided in .chm format, to make it work on Windows Vista without the separate WinHelp viewer download.

On Windows Vista , the scheme editor will now show an error when you try to save into c:\Program Files\ when you're not running as administrator. Previously, the scheme editor would appear to be able to save files into c:\Program Files, but couldn't. Vista's folder virtualization feature would show the file to the scheme editor, but actually saved it elsewhere. This made the scheme files invisible to EditPad Pro and Windows Explorer, which don't use folder virtualization. Now, the scheme editor behaves the same way, avoiding any confusion.

The proper place to save your scheme files on Vista is c:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\JGsoft\EditPad Pro 6. If you download schemes via Options, Configure File Types, Syntax & Navigation, that's where EditPad Pro will put them. If there's a scheme with the same name under AppData as under Program Files, the one in AppData will override the one in Program Files. You can easily navigate to this folder by clicking the (...) button next to the INI file option in Options, Preferences, System.

Updated: JGCSCSE 3.1.2

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 +0700

If you own EditPad Pro 6, PowerGREP 3 or RegexBuddy 3, you can now download version 3.1.2 of the JGsoft Custom Syntax Coloring Scheme Editor. With this tool you can adapt the syntax coloring in these applications, and even create new schemes for previously unsupported programming languages and file formats.

The installer now shows a Create Portable Installation button in the welcome screen. If you have installed EditPad Pro on a removable drive, you can use this button to install the syntax coloring scheme editor along with it. There's no way to do this from the application itself, like you can in EditPad. You have to use the installer. The help file is now provided in .chm format, to make it work on Windows Vista without the separate WinHelp viewer download.

For PowerGREP 3, the custom scheme folder is c:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\JGsoft\PowerGREP 3. For RegexBuddy 3, it is c:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\JGsoft\RegexBuddy 3.

Updated: AceText 2.1.3

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:00:00 +0700

AceText 2.1.3 is now available for download. This version brings a number of minor fixes and improvements.

This version fixes a rather serious bug, which fortunately occurred only in a rare number of situations. If another application messed up the clipboard viewer chain in a particular way, AceText would crash with a stack overflow. When a stack overflow occurs in an application, Windows will often terminate the application straight away, without showing any error messages. This made AceText vanish at seemingly random times.

AceText's installer can now install AceText directly onto a removable drive. Simply click the Create Portable Installation button and follow the steps. The Install on Removable Drive item in the Help was renamed to Create Portable Installation for consistency. So if you only use AceText in a portable manner, you can now install it directly that way. If you run it both off your hard disk and off a removable device, you can still use the item in the Help menu to copy your installation. Portable installations are not supported by the free evaluation version. This is unchanged.

You can now use the keyboard shortcuts F6, Shift+F6 and Ctrl+F6 for Find Next Clip, Find Previous Clip and Find First Clip. These commands always move to another clip, while F3 and Shift+F3 will move the selection within a clip if it contains the search term more than once.

Password-protected collections are now handled better. Activating an encrypted collection will now automatically give keyboard focus to the password field. Clip|Duplicate Clips and Clip|Move Clips no longer show read-only and locked collections as available destination collections. Dragging and dropping a clip into a locked collection will no longer silently overwrite the existing collection with the dropped clip. AceText will now refuse drops on locked collections. Commands like Save As are now disabled for locked collections, instead of showing an error message.

A number of minor bugs were fixed as well. You can find a complete list in the version history on AceText's web site.

If you have already purchased AceText, you can download this free update for free.
Buy AceText now.
Complete Version History.

Updated: DeployMaster 3.0.0

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:00:00 +0700

DeployMaster 3.0.0 is now available for download. This release is a free update for all licensed DeployMaster users.

DeployMaster 3.0.0 introduces two major features, each adding a tab to the DeployMaster Builder. On the Portable tab, you can turn on the option to show a Create Portable Installation button in the installer's welcome screen. When the user clicks this button, he can chose a removable device to install your software on. The installer will then copy all the files to the removable device, without making any changes to the host computer.

Our products AceText, EditPad Pro, PowerGREP and RegexBuddy have had an Install on Removable Drive item in their Help menus for some time. The next releases of these products will allow you to do the same thing by clicking the Create Portable Installation button right within the installer, without having to install the software on your hard disk first.

The other major new feature in DeployMaster is the ability to install the .NET framework and any other 3rd party library. On the 3rd party tab, simply mark the version(s) of the .NET framework that your application is compatible with, and which other installers need to be run. DeployMaster can detect whether the .NET framework or the other items have already been installed, and only run the installers as necessary. You can bundle the 3rd party installers, including the .NET framework, within your own setup.exe to create one big download. Or, you can bundle the installers as separate files along with your setup.exe. Finally, you can include just a download URL in your setup.exe. Your setup will them prompt the user to download and install the components your application depends on when your setup detects they're missing.

To support this new functionality, additional strings were added to the Language tab. If you made your own translation, you'll have to translate the new strings. You'll find them at the bottom of the list.

If you have already purchased DeployMaster, you can download this free update for free.
Buy DeployMaster now.
Complete Version History.