News archive
JPEG Saver 5.17
The first of the big changes I wanted to get done is included in version 5.17 of JPEG Saver. Unfortunately it is mostly internal, so I'll lead with something a bit more visible.
Folder sets
This has been on the to-do list for a very long time, and it is actually one of the first things I entered into my issue tracking system back in 2016. Now when you enter the folders tab on the config dialog you will see a new box marked “Folder set” along with a button next to it called “Set”
Together these work a lot like the presets in the filters dialog - you can save, load, delete and clear the sets, either replacing the main folders list or appending to it.
JPEG Saver 5.16
There is not as much in version 5.16 of JPEG Saver as I had wanted to get done, but the next few items on the to-do list could take a while and there are a couple of important bug fixes to get out. It also includes a couple of other useful features, so I'm not too disappointed.
Span across displays
The most interesting new option in version 5.16 is in the multi-monitor dialog. In the drop-down list for the main display you will now find an option saying “Span across displays”. What this does is create a single window that covers the whole of your virtual desktop and treats it as one screen.
How well this works really depends on your graphics card being able to cope with it and your different screen positions not causing problems. If you have two identical monitors side-by-side it should work well; in my case the monitors are different sizes, shapes and resolutions so sometimes things are off the bottom edge of one screen. This is because JPEG Saver's display code can only handle rectangular screens and doesn't care that (0,1079) on the virtual screen is somewhere below the bezel on my physical monitor.
TagCanvas 2.11
This is another small update to TagCanvas, adding something that was suggested recently and fixing a small bug from the previous version.
Turn and face the strange
If you hover your cursor over one of these tags the image should change.
This is enabled with the new altImate option, which makes
TagCanvas load the second image inside a tag as the active image for that
tag. With altImage left as false, the second
image is ignored as it was before.
SVGGraph 3.10
Version 3.10 of SVGGraph is a smaller update, mainly fixing a few things and improving a couple of others.
Text shapes, figures, markers
Until now it wasn't easy to display text in a marker. You could do it using custom markers, but that meant knowing enough SVG to create the marker shape yourself. I know how to do it, but I shouldn't really expect people using SVGGraph to learn SVG just for that. So now you can define text shapes and figures, and since you can use figures in markers you can use text there too:
The first two datasets here have "A" and "B" as their text labels. The third
dataset has more text, though I've used a transform to scale it down to the same
size as the others. The text in the top left corner of the graph is using a text
shape as well, though a custom label would be more flexible there.
JPEG Saver 5.15
My JPEG Saver to-do list could be roughly divided into 1: big complicated things; 2: small fiddly things; and 3: transitions. Version 5.15 doesn't have any new big complicated things in it, but the others are present.
Useful things
First up is something that I only just realised would be useful, but for some reason I had never even thought of it before. The JPEG Saver config dialog now has a taskbar entry when it is not opened from the Control Panel. The reason I added this is that I kept finding myself opening config dialogs and losing them behind other windows, which got a bit annoying.
The other useful thing I have added is in the item editor dialog. The list
of formatting tokens can be very long, and the tokens by themselves are fairly
meaningless, so now when you position the cursor in e.g. %xX in the
format edit box the token list will scroll to and select the %xX
token. (The example is “Exposure time” in the image info item.) There
is a checkbox at the top of the tokens list if you want to turn it off.