Finally, finally, I have merged documents that don’t lose formatting. I still have some things to clean up, and I’m sure, once you get your hands on it, you’ll find all sorts of situations where it doesn’t work right, but, at least now, I’ll be able to fix those things.

Basically, right now, the only things that will break the exporting would come from text and other things that are pasted into the document. Not all pastes will break it, but anything with odd formatting might.

I spent far too many nights fiddling with oddball solutions that I just couldn’t wrap my head around or get to work right, so I finally gave up and just wrote my own RTF parser/merger. Hopefully, in the next couple of days, you’ll get to try it yourself and tell me how badly it’s broken. I can say, however, that it is currently FAR better than before.

And just like that, 0.0.54! – Fixed an issue with exporting rtf files and preview that was reported to me.

I fixed a few things in this build, most notably, the absolutely annoying empty document font color issue and a crash using the search functionality. Check it out here.

So, yeah, it’s not much of an update, but it’s a start. You can now empty the trash.

What took so long, you ask? Remember that other work I do? Well, it kept eating my time, right up through the day before Christmas Eve, and I’d planned a vacation over the Christmas holidays to get away from the computer and hang with my kids some (since they were home from school) and basically just recharge as much as I could. So I took that vacation, and I feel much better now, thank you. 🙂

I have spent time working on the export functionality, and basically, the merge in rtf format is kicking my butt. Something about merging the documents together is ruining all the formatting, and I haven’t figured it out yet. For the time being, you can export each document separately to maintain any formatting you want (bold, italics, etc…) which isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing. I am going to continue to work on the export merge of rtf since I cannot in my mind call it done until that works correctly. But in the meantime, I’m also going to try to keep putting out little fixes for other things as well.

It’s BACK TO WORK time!

My day job crisis is finally slowing down, and I’ve manage to squeeze out a few hours for StoryBox. Fixed a couple bugs, and added some additional export options, and spent a few hours trying to make the rtf export correctly merge documents so that the formatting (bold, italic, etc..) doesn’t get lost, but for some reason, it gets lost if I merge two documents together. Yay for bugs in components I didn’t write!

I’m really really sorry for the delay between the last update and this one, but there literally was no time. I couldn’t even finish my NaNo novel. I heard a couple grumblings that maybe I’d gone away, never to return, and that SB was “dead”. That is absolutely not the case. I’m completely committed to supporting StoryBox for the long haul. I’m approaching the point where the really easy fixes and changes are done, and only hard stuff remains. In software development, typically the first 90% of the features take up only about half the development time. And I think that’s where I’m at now. I’ve got the first 90% done. Now, it’s time for polish and refinement, and that’s probably going to take another three months or so. You won’t see any huge changes between now and then, I suspect, but there will be lots of difficult, minor looking changes (like the rtf export issue – I think I’m going to have to write my own rtf library… boo! hiss!).