Archive for April, 2009

Unicode vs. Windows 9x/Me

Friday, April 17th, 2009

As some of you probably know, our tools are developed with an older version of Delphi. In my opinion, Delphi was always a great development system, the only disadvantage (at least for me) was that Unicode was not supported natively.

In WebSite-Watcher, we had to use third party stuff and many workarounds to get Unicode working, and it was sometimes a tricky and time intensive task. In our other tools, Unicode was not or only partially supported.

Last year, a new version of Delphi with  built-in Unicode support has been released. We are now in the progress to move all our tools to that new compiler to get the advantage of full Unicode support. It is already done for the upcoming versions of WebSite-Watcher 5.1.0, Local Website Archive 3.1.0 and AM-Notebook 5.2.0.

In WebSite-Watcher this meant removing hundreds of workarounds, but as a result we got a much cleaner code and many other advantages in handling web pages.

With that move, we can no longer support Windows 9x/Me/NT, the minimum OS that will be required to use our tools is Windows 2000 or higher.

Posted in General | 4 Comments »

WebSite-Watcher and PDF files

Friday, April 10th, 2009

In WebSite-Watcher 4.x, PDF files were handled as binary files. You only got a notification when a PDF file was changed, but it was not possible to highlight changes in the text.

In a previous post I talked about the new Plugin system of WebSite-Watcher 5.0. WebSite-Watcher 5 contains a pre-defined PDF Plugin that can extract the text content of a PDF file and convert it into a readable HTML file. That means that you can check PDF files like normal web pages, search for keywords, highlight changes and use the rest of features which are available for web page monitoring. This was a very often requested feature that is now finally implemented in version 5.

 

Basic program configuration

For the PDF-to-text conversion, the third party tool XPDF is required and must be downloaded and installed separately. Then you have to enter the path to the file pdftotext.exe in the WebSite-Watcher program configuration.

Program configuration for PDF files

 

Bookmark configuration

For each PDF bookmark, you have to make the following configuration:

  1. Create a new bookmark and enter the address of the PDF file into the URL field
  2. Select the “Advanced” tab
  3. Select “Plugins” on the left side
  4. Click the “Select Plugin” button
  5. Click the radio button “Compatible”
  6. Select the PDF Plugin from the list

Select PDF Plugin

 

Available PDF Plugins

There are currently two PDF Plugins available:

  1. Conversion with Layout
    This Plugin tries to keep the layout of the PDF content what might be useful when a PDF file contains tables. The converted page will probably have a horizontal scrollbar and you have to scroll horizontally to see the whole content of a paragraph.
  2. Simple text extraction
    This Plugin performs a simple text extraction and you might loose some formattings, but you should never see a horizontal scrollbar when viewing the converted document.

Both Plugins have advantages and disadvantages (dependent on the XPDF tool), you have to test and select the Plugin individually for each bookmark.

See also: http://www.aignes.com/wswhelp/topics/pdf-files.htm

Posted in WebSite-Watcher | No Comments »

New versions

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

This week, WebSite-Watcher 5.0.2 and AM-Notebook 5.1.0 have been released.

WebSite-Watcher 5.0.2 is a bugfix and maintenance release. A list of changes can be found  in the version history.

AM-Notebook 5.1.0 is a major new release and contains several new features and improvements, for example Tab locking , Quickly open notes and LWA integration. A full list of changes can be found in the version history.

Posted in AM-Notebook, WebSite-Watcher | No Comments »

Signs of life

Monday, April 6th, 2009

It was a bit quiet here after my skiing accident in February, but I always worked full time on our tools (except the 5 days I had to stay in the hospital). During the next months I still have to spend approx. 2 hours a day into therapy, but I’m getting better each day.

I’ll start blogging about our tools and current development in a couple of days, so watch this place to get the latest information. Thanks for your patience :)

Martin Aignesberger

Posted in General | 1 Comment »