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Changes and Additions to OMhelp During 2003

Description
12-20
11-30
11-22
11-17
11-05
11-01
10-19
09-23
09-14
08-16
08-02
07-25
07-18
07-17
06-29
06-23
06-19
06-12
06-11
06-05
06-03
05-23
05-22
05-20
05-11
05-10
05-09
05-08
05-06
04-30
04-25
04-20
04-18
04-16
04-15
04-11
03-24
03-21
03-20
03-13
03-12
03-11
03-05
02-23
02-20
02-19
02-18
02-17
02-10
02-09
02-08
02-07
02-05
02-04
02-03
02-02
01-30
01-29
01-28
01-25
01-24
01-21
01-20
01-11
01-10
01-08
01-07
01-04
01-01

Description
This section contains a list of changes to OMhelp during 2003 (in reverse order by date). Its purpose is to assist you in learning about changes between versions.

12-20
The arguments to the index, cindex, mindex commands are now case sensitive and the corresponding index entries can have both upper and lower case. (Before this change, all the Keywords were converted to lower case.)

11-30
The environment variable omhelp_dir can now be defined (or its definition can be overridden) using the windows INI file.

11-22
The batch file omh/build.bat did not function properly during step 5 of the Windows install procedure This has been fixed.

The OMhelp documentation could not be built during the Install procedure (on Unix) because all the htm directories were write protected. This has been fixed.

11-17
The contents section now remembers which sections are open and which are closed so that when you return to it, its state is restored.

The executable distribution OMhelpExe.zip had a debugging instead of optimized version of the executable. This has been fixed. In addition, the omh/build.bat file did not work properly. This has also been fixed.

11-05
The contents section was changed to display section titles instead of cross reference tags .

11-01
The pre command was changed so that no extra white space is output around the command. This is an aid in the exact placement of text on the page.

10-19
Harmonic Software has agreed to transfer it's OMhelp copyright to Brad in exchange for Brad releasing his current version of OMhelp under the Gnu GPL license. The install is being changed significantly in order to include source code and developer documentation for both Windows and Unix.

09-23
The pmathml.xsl style sheet with id
 
     $Id: pmathml.xsl,v 1.7 2002/09/20 08:41:40 davidc Exp $
was crashing Mozilla version 1.4. This style sheet was replaced by the one with id
 
     $Id: pmathml.xsl,v 1.8 2003/06/23 14:46:44 davidc Exp $
which was obtained from the web site
     
http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/Overview-tech.html
This seems to work with most versions of IE and Mozilla.

09-14
There was a bug in the Latex macro processor that showed up when the arguments in the macro were used in a different order than their definitions. For example
 
     \newcommand{\D}[2]{ \partial_#2 #1 }
This has been fixed.

08-16
The words Hilbert, Lagrange, Lagrangian, supremum, and infimum were added to local.wrd .

08-02
The word Gaussian was added to local.wrd .

07-25
The Latex error reporting was improved by detecting when the following commands were not terminated:
Begin Command Terminate Command
{ }
\[ \]
\left \right
\begin{array} \end{array}

07-18
The xml printable version was not displaying properly in Internet Explorer. This was fixed by including a <head> ... </head> command in the output file.

07-17
In the navigation frame on the left, under Headings, and in the case of subheadings : both the heading and subheading, with a . between them, were displayed for the corresponding link. For a case with a lot of subheadings under one heading, this was hard to read because the initial text for each entry was identical. This has been changed by indenting the subheadings under the heading and not repeating the heading text.

06-29
There was a bug in the LatexMacro command whereby macros definitions were sometimes overwritten by new macro definitions. This has been fixed.

06-23
If the -xml command line option was specified and character < appeared in an head command, the output file would not display. If the character appeared in an index command, the index would not display. This has been fixed.

06-19
There was a bug in the LatexMacro expansions. If there was no characters following a macro invocation, the last letter in the macro name would be added to the output just after the macro. For example $latex \name$$ where \name is a latex macro would have an extra e added after the macro expansion. This has been fixed.

06-12
The script that which runs all the getting started examples was printing out the wrong get_started directory. This has been fixed.

06-11
A getting started section for embedding OMhelp commands in computer source code was added.

06-05
An inline command with no corresponding output used to generate an error message. Such empty commands are now legal and are useful for defining macros with global scope .

06-03
The error message was not helpful when the file name in a contents, childtable, or children command was empty. This has been fixed.

05-23
The Unix install did not work because the case of some file names were incorrect. This has been fixed. In addition, the distribution procedure has been modified so that it checks for this type of file name error.

05-22
Some typographical errors in the documentation for Latex macros were fixed. A readme.htm file was added to the distribution. Some temporary files that are not used were removed from the distribution.

05-20
Latex macros were added.

Specifications were supplied for supported usage of the mathml command (besides testing). In addition, the \# escape sequence was added to mathml command so it could be used with macros .

The browser problems sections were moved because they do not just pertain to latex commands.

05-11
All of the color commands were modified so that they could use either colorname or RGB values . The textcolor command was added to control the color of normal text.

05-10
There is a problem with IE explorer whereby it will wrap lines at the - character. The change on 05-08 used the HTML <nobr> command, which is non-standard, to get around this problem. This was changed to use the white-space: nowrap style which is a valid command according to the style sheet and HTML standard.

05-09
The documentation for english.wrd and local.wrd has been improved. In addition, pointers to this documentation have been added to the index and search utility.

The nobreak command was added so one can ensure that a sequence of text appears on the same line.

05-08
Pre-formatted text in pre , math , verbatim commands (and elsewhere) could have line breaks at non-white space characters. For example, at the - character. This has been fixed.

05-06
The default background color was not being transferred to the table of contents. This problem has been fixed. (The default background color is specified by placing bgcolor command in the root section . )

A command line argument that specifies a web site's name has been added. This name is currently used when constructing the title for the page that searches the web site. It may have other uses in the future.

The command name of the command line argument starting_file has been changed to root to signify that it contains the root section .

04-30
The bgcolor command was added for setting the background color. This command uses RGB codes instead of color names as in the other color commands.

A bug report about background colors in Mozilla was included in the documentation (these reports are now relative to Firefox ).

04-25
Part of the change on 03-24 was that the index is not generated when there is only one section. This caused a memory leak that has been fixed. In addition, the release version of OMhelp was printing some memory allocation information only intended for the debugging version. This has also been fixed.

04-20
The blank link between the automatic links and the beginning of the first frame of a section has been changed to a horizontal rule. This actually requires less horizontal space and provides better separation. The automatic links include a this link, that links the first frame to the corresponding entire section. The alignment for the this link, in frames other than the first frame, has been changed to right justified form centered.

If two image files come from different directories, but their file names are the same, one would overwrite the other in the output directory. An error message is printed in this case and OMhelp stops. The test for this problem, and similar problems, was in error because upper and lower case does not matter when running OMhelp under MS Windows. This has been fixed.

04-18
There was an error in the change the 04-16 change to the search utility that caused it to not work in some older browsers. This has been fixed.

04-16
The search utility was modified so that it automatically detects when Javascript is disabled and displays an error message. In addition, the instructions in the search utility have been improved.

The change on 03-12 placed the automatically generated links at the top of the first frame of a section. This caused there to be no space between the automatically generated links and the title specified by the section command. At least one blank line is now placed between the section title and any text above it.

04-15
The words Bucy, Kalman, and Markov were added to local.wrd .

04-11
Some of the MathML browser problems have been fixed by the browser providers. The sections Mozilla and Explorer have been changed to reflect this (the Mozilla section has been replaced by Firefox ).

03-24
In the event that there is only one section, the automatically generated links on the page were still being generated (but did not connect to anything). This has been fixed. In addition, extra files that were not being used are no longer generated (or are automatically removed). This makes the output of OMhelp much simpler for this one section case.

03-21
There seems to be a problem with Mozilla's viewing of XML files that use Javascript (this is now reported in Javascript ). For this reason, both the search and table of contents use an HTML frame to link the XML versions.

Some versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer seem to be very slow at interpreting Javascript. For this reason, the non-printable table of contents was changed to reduce the computation time.

03-20
For the non-printable version, the table of contents was changed to be like a file browser.

03-13
The Javascript search utility was moved to a separate file instead of being embedded in the HTML files. This was done because it cannot be embedded in XML files and hence the XML must use HTML for its searching. Unfortunately, I ran into another bug in Mozilla related to Javascript so the HTML searching is still necessary.

The location of the current section with in the web site is now displayed at the beginning of the navigation frame.

03-12
The automatically generated links to entire sections, such as previous and next, are now placed at the top of each section. This leaves more room in the navigation frame for heading and other information. In addition, each frame now has a link (at its beginning) to the section that it appears in. This way one can follow from a link that just replaces a frame to the corresponding entire section.

03-11
The previous link did not drill down to the deepest child of the previous section. For example, the previous link in the following tree mapped from section number 5 to section number 3:
     | 1 |
       | children
       v      next
     | 2 | ---------->  | 5 |
       | children
       v
     | 3 |
       | children
       v
     | 4 |

03-05
The words covariance, discretization, and laplace was added to local.wrd .

02-23
In order to make MathML work with Internet Explorer on 03-02-17 the &nbsp; command was changed to its unicode value &xA0;. This does not work for HTML display on some old browsers; for example, Netscape 4.5. This has been fixed by using &nbsp; for HTML files and &xA0; for XML files.

02-20
There was a problem with the display of the \left . and \right . Latex commands in MS Internet Explorer due to some confusion about using mspace as an operator. This has been fixed.

02-19
It was possible to hang OMhelp when processing a latex comment . For example, the input
 
     $latex x = y % first equation$$
This has been fixed.

Documentation was added for the latex comment command.

The \Box symbol was added to possible output symbols even though neither Mozilla or Explorer display it properly.

A warning was added to the documentation for the subscript and superscript documentation.

02-18
The display of the Mozilla in the Mozilla browser seems to be broken (this is now reported in Firefox under bar). The over bar (instead of the under parenthesis) is now used in its place. This makes the display in MS Internet Explorer better. (This problem has since been fixed.)

In the Mozilla browser, some diacritical marks do not work with the accent attribute true. The corresponding display has been improved by setting the accent attribute to false.

The Problems Using MS Internet Explorer 6 To Display OMhelp Output section was started in order to track and fix problems using Internet Explorer. Starting with the latex section, the Explorer display for all the commands through the arrow symbols have been checked.

The word internet was added to local.wrd .

The latex \empty command was being translated into the proper MathML symbol. This has been fixed.

02-17
MathML output generated by OMhelp can now be viewed using MS Internet Explorer browser. This requires the Mathplayer plug in which is freely available from. Design Science .

02-10
Getting started examples were added for the font and verbatim commands.

The installation procedure sometimes had warning messages that did not correspond to any problems. In particular, grep, which is not needed, does not exist, and a confirmation request on deletion of the OMhelp documentation directory before its recreation.

02-09
In displayed formulas , the position of the limits for integrals (\int and \oint ) were above and below instead of to the right. This has been fixed.

02-08
Subscripts and superscripts following a right command were not working. This has been fixed.

02-07
The hspace command added on 02-05 introduced a bug that gave an error message when ever the characters em, ex, cm, mm, in, pt, or pc appeared in the input and not inside an hspace command. This have been fixed.

The default font for greek characters used to be italic, now it is the normal font.

The spacing between a sequence of ascii letters has been changed. This enables one to create new functions, using Latex constructs such as {\rm argmax} with out extra spacing being added between the characters in argmax.

02-05
The Latex hspace command was added.

The The Purpose and Motivation for OMhelp section was updated and improved.

02-04
The MathML mi command is a Token Element. Section 3.2.1 of the MathML version 2.0 specifications states that "Apart from the mglyph element, the malignmark element is the only other element allowed in the content of tokens." OMhelp was putting mstyle elements inside of mi elements in order to override the font selection for the mi elements. This is now being done using the mathvariant attribute to an mi element. However, it is unclear that this should work (see the mi font ).

The Latex spacing commands were added.

02-03
The change made for the -nowarn command line option introduce a bug in the reporting of spelling errors (the read font command was not terminated). This has been fixed.

02-02
If the root section does not have any contents, childtable, or children commands, the entire web site consists of just one section. In this case, the navigation frame is not included along the left margin because there are not other sections to navigate to. In addition, the following web site navigation sections are not generated: _contents , _reference , _index , _search , _external .

A getting starting example for using the fend command was added to the documentation for OMhelp.

The user documentation build command would generate an error message because the links to the search and external sections are not defined in the printable version. The -nowarn command line option was added so that these warnings could be suppressed.

01-30
If a tref command followed a heading or subheading and no other text appeared before the next heading or subheading, the spacing above the second heading was missing. This has been fixed.

01-29
The local copy of the OMhelp documentation is no longer included in the Windows download file. This is because all the *.htm and *.xml files make the download file significantly larger and they are regenerated during the generate user documentation step of the install process.

The change on 03-01-04 allowed one to replace an entire window by just one frame of another window. When this happened, the user did not have a navigation link available. This has been fixed by making it illegal to replace the entire window with a link to a particular heading.

01-28
A directory must be included in the specification for the file containing the root section . The error message and documentation about this has been improved.

If a $codep, or any other command, had a very long argument, the flex generated lexical analyzer spent a lot of time copying the text between buffers. The OMhelp lexical analyzer was written directly in C instead of using flex to generate it. OMhelp now runs much faster than it used to.

01-25
The following words were added to local.wrd : deconvolution, bayesian, exponentials, eigenfunction, eigenfunctions.

01-24
The xref command was extended so that the subheading can be specified as a separate argument. This allows for placing the heading and subheadings are separate lines in the xref command (which is useful when they are long).

The cross reference error message printed on stdout were improved.

The table of examples in the get_started section was improved.

The getting started directory batch file RunAll was changed so that both the HTML and XML output is generated for the latex example.

01-21
A local dictionary ; i.e., the file local.wrd, was added to the default distribution. The following words were included in this file: affine, eigenvalue, eigenvalues, eigenvector, eigenvectors, exponentiation, factorization, fourier, hermitian, integrand, nonnegative, orthogonal, piecewise, quadrature, recursion, recursive, stochastic, variate.

01-20
A Unix source code install version of OMhelp is now available from Brad's home page .

01-11
When the -xml option is not present, spell checking of the latex command was generating a lot of errors. Spelling checking in this case is now automatically suspended.

If aindex subhead is active, the escape character can be used to suppress words in a subheading from appearing in the index (see description of aindex in head ). These escape characters were appearing in the actual subheadings. This has been fixed.

If there was a new line between a double word, the error message put the two copies of the word on different lines. This has been fixed.

Some symbols, such as infinity, were not being placed properly when used as limits. This has been fixed.

01-10
A getting started section was added for the image and latex commands.

The old example section, and its children were removed because the get_started section provides better examples.

01-08
A getting started section for the xref command was added.

01-07
The latex font commands were added.

01-04
The left and right commands were not displaying properly in Mozilla. This has been fixed.

01-01
A getting started section for the indexing commands was added.
Input File: omh/whats_new/03.omh