Tellico

Bookcase 0.7 Released

OK, Bookcase 0.7 is ready. I think everything is mostly polished, but inevitably I find something dumb in the packaging 10 seconds after I put up the tarball.

First, the XML format changed significantly so any XSL stylesheets or XML importers will have to be changed. And that means that versions of Bookcase earlier than 0.7 won’t be able to open 0.7 data files.

Bookcase 0.7 adds default collections for bibliographies, video collections, and music collections. It’s not meant to be a music manager, more of an inventory program for your discs or videos. The bibliography is closely coupled with the bibtex format right now. It’s the only collection that can be exported to bibtex, so existing book collections will have to be convert to a bibliography via the menu item if you want to export to bibtex or bibtexml.

Two new field types were added: single and double-column tables. They’re good for music tracks or video cast lists.

The printing was significantly reworked. There are no longer separate config options for the printed fields. Only the fields in the list view are printed, and all entries are sorted as they are in the view. Furthermore, if there’s currently a filter showing a subset of the collection, only those entries will be printed. So if you modified the default bookcase-printing.xsl stylesheet, you’ll have to move it.

The import and export routines were reworked. Export formats now include CSV and HTML, along with any generic XSL transform. Bookcase can now import both bibtex and CSV now. The bibtex import is via an internal copy of the btparse library from Greg Ward.

Minor improvements include numerical sorting, a Tip of the Day dialog, and config dialogs for the toolbars and shortcut keys. Fields can also be re-ordered so their layout in the editor may be modified. Finally, if more than one field is formatted as a name, a pseudo-group is created for all those fields together, meaning fields such as Author and Editor can be grouped together.

Do let me know of any problems or bugs that you find.