This topic contains the release notes that document the new features, improvements and bug fixes that were included in the various releases of Q++Studio in 2016.
See also: release notes of the current year and release notes of other years.
December 31, 2016 (build 17019)
New and Improved
•The link to the bespoke Q++Studio TeamViewer installer is now for the newest TeamViewer version 12.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a lot of minor memory leaks.
November 30, 2016 (build 16960)
New and Improved
•Updated the DIB (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) Islamic calendar used in Turkey and most of the Balkans with recently-updated official data for the calendar years 2019, 2021 and 2022.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a UI glitch whereby the icons were incorrect for some of pop-up menu items of the Holidays Manager's Holidays Sets TreeView (26-nov-2016).
•Fixed a bug which would cause some of the Global Saras to be ignored during Diary Generation (Brunnen, 24-nov-2016).
•The option to import data from only one single column of an Excel file was being ignored (Panthera, 16-nov-2016).
•Added code to prevent users from trying to switch to a version of QuarkXPress that is not installed on their PC (Biella, 1-nov-2016).
October 31, 2016 (build 16888)
New and Improved
•It is now possible to select one of your user-defined dashes and stripes in the Rule Above/Below Style of GenTokens and Minicalendars.
•Updated the JAKIM (Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia) Islamic calendar used in Malaysia with recently-released official data for the calendar year 2018.
•Added 2 new macro functions: ColorInScript and ColorInTemplate to check is a given color name is defined.
•Using QuarkXPress 2015 or 2016, it is now possible to keep the layers of all incoming templates so that the output file will contain all the layers of all the used templates, with all the objects on their correct layer. In addition to the convenience of having layers maintained in the output file, this also speeds up the page copying portion of diary generation.
•Q++Studio is compatible with QuarkXPress version 2016 (12.2) released officially today, October 1st.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug which would prevent the use of the same macro, for more than one macro index, if that macro created global Lists at run-time. (Alpha Edition, 31-oct-2016).
•Fixed an error that would occur when synchronizing a holidays set that is empty and whose linked holidays sets contains Muslim, solar or lunisolar recurrence rules (Buroodisain, 28-oct-2016).
•Fixed a minor UI glitch in the minicalendar preview of the Minicalendar Options and Minicalendar Preview dialogs, whereby specially selected colors for weekdays would not be displayed in the preview (13-oct-2016).
•Fixed a minor bug in the Worldwide Public Holidays updater, whereby, in the Excel log of changes, the list of years affected by each difference would refer to 2007-2009 instead of 2017-2019 (5-oct-2016).
September 30, 2016 (build 16809)
New and Improved
•Expanded the list and scope of Astronomical Tokens with the addition of planetary tokens and miscellaneous astronomical tokens, to allow an easy and comprehensive access to all the astronomical functions available in Q++Studio, and in particular in the Astronomical Data Export module.
•Expanded the scope of the data being calculated in the Astronomical Data Export module.
•Added some detailed instructions on how to address the problem whereby, in some cases, under Windows 7, when closing QuarkXPress 2015 or 2016, Windows issues a message such as QuarkXPress 201x has stopped working, at the very last moment, when QuarkXPress closes down, although the current step (scanning or generating has completed successfully.
•Improved the Holidays Synchronization UI and added navigation options within the Holidays Manager to move from one linked set to another.
•Code-cleaning and optimization.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a repaint issue in the TreeView when the Holidays Manager is re-sized (21-sep-2016).
•Fixed a bug in the Worldwide Public Holidays updater, whereby some of the Ignored holidays of the development database would appear in the log of changes which is displayed at the end of the update (17-sep-2016).
•Fixed a few minor bugs in the code controlling QuarkXPress, in particular for scripts containing more than 64K instructions (11-sep-2016).
August 31, 2016 (build 16747)
New and Improved
•Updated the Turkish DIB Islamic calendar (Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi), used in Turkey and in most of the Balkans, to reflect this past week's announced changes to the dates of the dates for the month of Rabi-al-Awal 1439 AH.
•Added detailed and illustrated step-by-step instructions for Holidays Synchronization.
•Improved the Holidays Synchronization by taking into account year ranges in holiday names variations and by purging obsolete holiday names variations.
•Added the option to specify the "Length" of a rule above/below as "Column", in the dialogs to set GenTokens Line Endings and Minicalendar Paragraph Formatting.
•It is now possible to use macros to change the value of a color at run-time (ie. based on the date of a token, for example).
•Added the [BOXGROW] token for cases when you might just want the box resulting from a [BOXFIT] token to be large enough to fit the contained text, but do no care if the box is larger than needed (and therefore do not wish the corresponding warning message to appear).
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug in the main updater whereby the downloaded updates files would be deleted at the end of the update, thus wasting time as it required the updater to re-download the updates files for each user who ran the updater (Letts, 30-aug-2016).
•(important) Fixed a random memory corruption that would occur if any of the sub-folders containing the the Output File was short, of length comparable to "...", such as \ABB\ for example (Brunnen, 26-aug-2016).
•Fixed a bug in the processing of [BOXFIT] tokens whereby the step size and maximum box size parameters would be read from the settings of the following box in the order of processing (14-aug-2016).
•The Restore From Backup tool would not restore the Messaging temporary table (8-aug-2016).
July 31, 2016 (build 16674)
New and Improved
•Q++Studio supports QuarkXPress 2016.1 (a free update that contains many improvements).
•The messages that alert you to missing VC++ 2010 runtimes or missing VC++ 2015 runtimes now give you the option of having Q++Studio automatically install these run-times for you.
•Made the simple filtering in the advanced data grid behave the same way in all dialogs that use the Advanced Data Grid; all filtering is now partial match and case-insensitive by default, though options were added to allow you to specify your own exact wild-card filtering, or none at all.
•Expanded the Export Astronomical Data module by including 2-body and 3-body nearest visual approaches, such as Mars/Venus/Moon all being within 1.95° of each other in February 2015.
•Added the possibility of basing holidays response tokens on Moon phases, Seasons or Zodiac signs.
•Improved the message displayed if the previously-used version of QuarkXPress is no longer available (ie. after upgrading to a new version of QuarkXPress) and the corresponding help topic now contains clear instructions as to what needs to be done to fix the issue.
•Improved the calculation of planetary and star visibility, in particular the visual magnitudes for Venus and Mercury which have been adapted according to Hilten 2005.
•Added more details in the progress status information displayed during the page copying stage of diary generation, in particular identifying the Fix z-Order stage of the page copying, which can be lengthy if you have a few hundred objects placed on a layer that is not the default layer of the template.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a minor UI glitch whereby the minor version number of QuarkXPress displayed in the Main Window's status bar would not be updated immediately after synchronizing the internal and external versions of QuarkXPress following an update to QuarkXPress (29-july-2016).
•Fixed the response option to the Output Folder refers to the wrong Year message, which would not create a new folder if needed (20-july-2016).
•Fixed a division by zero error in the DLL that accesses the NASA-JPL DE430 astronomical database used in the Export Astronomical Data module. This bug only affected some calculations of 2-body and 3-body nearest visual approaches involving the Moon, such as Mars/Venus/Moon all being within 1.95° of each other in February 2015. The effect was there for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the DLL, but was only actually visible in the 64-bit version, due to a difference in the way the 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft C compilers handle division by zero (Geigers, 11-july-2015).
•Fixed a few minor bugs in the calculation of the lunar occultation of planets and stars. The daytime occurrence of partial occultations (a very rare phenomenon), as well as other rare occultation events were missed by the previous calculation code.
June 30, 2016 (build 16600)
New and Improved
•Added a new Holiday Name Variation keyword, DEFAULT, to specify the name of the holiday to use, when none of the other special cases apply.
•Added the possibility of referring to the Year Property of the current script in either the Label and Comments properties of any PlaceHolder script line.
•Added new options to the calculation of Moon Day Tokens, so that the beginning of the lunar day can now be defined as at midnight, at sunrise, at sunset, at the previous day's sunset, at moonrise, at moonset, and at the previous day's moonset. The corresponding options can also be used when exporting Moon day values to an MS-Excel file using the Export Astronomical Data function.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug introduced in build 16325 of March 21, 2016, whereby tokens included in the text to surround Moon phases symbols of monthly grids of the Backtrack every Month style, would be calculated incorrectly (Letts, 27-june-2016).
•Fixed a minor UI glitch, in QuarkXPress versions 8 and above, whereby the template ID number, displayed in the progress dialog during the page copying stage of diary generation, would actually be the number of the current spread (almost always 1), instead of then of the template sequence number (as it appears in the Script lines (24-june-2016).
•Fixed a minor UI glitch whereby negative year offsets in the Beginning/Ending Rule property editor for monthly templates, would appear with a repeated - sign (ie as Y--1 instead of Y-1, for example) (19-june-2016).
•In the dialog used to copy scriptlines from another script, the time of the last used and last modified columns was based on UTC instead of the local time as seen by your computer (15-june-2016).
•Fixed a couple of minor issues with Place Holders script lines; the last character of the comments text would be truncated, and the placement of a PlaceHolder script line would cause a spurious text overflow message to be issued (14-june-2016).
•When copying scriptlines from another script, the script line Comments and whether the script line was commented-out or not, were not copied over to the target Script (12-june-2016).
•The Date Modified of macros in the Macros Table would be updated, even when no changes were made to the macro, for example when the macro was simply opened and closed (8-jun-2016).
May 31, 2016 (build 16522)
New and Improved
•When scanning or generating with QuarkXPress 2015 or 2016, the Conditional Styles Palette now gets closed along with all other palettes.
•Added a splash message during the potentially lengthy processes of copying saras from the shared database and script verification.
•Improved the navigation in the Page and Signature Layout section of Script Previews.
•Added the prediction of the Solar transit of the inner planets (Mercury and Venus) to the Astronomical Data Export module.
•Relaxed the restriction on the use of duration token suffixes for Sequential Holidays tokens.
•The warnings Maximum DayValue of [d] tokens is X but should be Y and Unexpected DayValue of X on page Y are now generated taking into account the use of DayValue Marker tokens.
•It is now possible to create a new scripts Folder from within the Script Save and Script Save As dialogs.
•Added text opacity to the list of available text formatting attributes, SARAs search and replace attributes, and Macros text results attributes.
•Added a new scanning warning to alert you if the sequence of a chain of linked textboxes backtracks.
•Added a new Skip Line property to Blank Pages, Place Holders, Quark Pages, and DiaryGridLines, as well as a new Skip Insert property to Insert script lines to allow for the selective skipping of pages and/or insertions based on a variety of cases, most relating to whether the Script Year or the date of each individual insertion is a leap year or not.
•Added the No line ending when token line is blank option to GenTokens Options. This new option is useful to generate monthly or yearly tables of events that do not occur everyday (holidays, planetary events, ...).
•The maximum number of GenTokens and MonthHeaders has been increased from 8 to 12.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a glitch in the formatting of the Excel file generated from exporting planetary data, whereby at high latitudes (mainly above the arctic circle), on days when planets do not rise, the fact that the planet did not rise would appear as a time of 00:00 instead of being left blank (Ajasto, 30-may-2016).
•Fixed a bug in the copy saras from the shared database function which would cause execution to abort (Alpha Edition, 26-may-2016).
•Fixed a bug in the Macros Editor whereby the Find/Find Next function would find correctly, but would not scroll the current memo so that the found text was visible (25-may-2016).
•Fixed a bug whereby an error message would appear if trying to open the Template Properties dialog of the Templates Explorer, while no Script was open (23-may-2016).
•Fixed a UI bug whereby the PDF Output Styles selector in the Diary Generation Options, in the Templates Menu and in the Tools Menu, would pre-select the wrong PDF Output Style, if 2 style names started with the same word followed by a space. (23-may-2016).
•Fixed a UI glitch in the Holidays Manager whereby you would need to reselect the current Holidays Set in the TreeView on the left before the list of one-time-dates would be filled-out (12-may-2016).
•Fixed a minor UI glitch in the displaying of individual editors in the properties inspector, whereby the selection rectangle would be off-center (3-may-2016).
April 30, 2016 (build 16416)
New and Improved
•It is now possible to abort the Export to PDF of the output file during Diary Generation.
•Relaxed the conditions under which warning message 176075 (GenTokens token is placed on the first line of its textbox) is issued. This message is now only issued if the GenTokens Options related to that token include paragraph line endings, such as hard returns, soft returns, formatting or Xtags.
•The Export Quark Files to PDF function now detects if your chosen PDF Distilling Style uses spreads (2 facing pages on one PDF page) or individual pages and the progress display takes this into account.
•Improved the update QuarkXPress file path dialog; the dialog now displays the file size as well as date of last modification, making it easier to tell multiple versions of the same file apart.
•The dialog used to import Recurring Holidays, One-Time-Dates, Saints , Saints Exceptions, and Slogans, now accepts the XLSX file extension as well as the traditional XLS file extension.
•Added moon day tokens to display the current lunar day from 1 to 30, with the New Moon being defined as either day 1 (western) or day 30 (Indian Tithis), with a Moon and Sun Option to specify which separator to use on dates which contain 2 lunar days. The corresponding Moon day values are now also part of the Moon data which can be exported to an MS-Excel file using the Export Astronomical Data function.
•Completed to coverage of all Indian States holidays, except those of the 7 sister states of the Northeast Frontier and hose of the few minor Union Territories (previously we only covered the 8 main population state of India).
•The Holidays Manager can now be re-sized vertically and clicking on the ID of a holiday's ancestor now takes you directly to that ancestor holiday.
•It is now possible to add the following formatting to one-time-dates: bold, italic, superscript.
•Expanded the recently-added scanning message alerting you if the QuarkXPress template being scanned is one with facing pages that allow odd-numbered pages to be placed on the left, to make the cause of the message, and its solution, more clear.
•Added a new week token to display the Estonian school week number.
•The Planetary Data part of the Astronomical Data Export has been fully overhauled and expanded. It now displays the azimuth corresponding to the planet's rise and set, as well as the morning and evening visibility with the time, altitude, azimuth and magnitude of the planet's best visibility moment every day. The altitude and azimuth of each planet at the time of sunrise and sunset is also displayed. The generated Excel file can thus be used to determine the visibility of any planet over the year, from any location on Earth.
Fixed and Corrected
•Under some circumstances, Q++Studio would fail to automatically close an instance of QuarkXPress 2016 that had been launched manually (not by Q++Studio itself), due to the QuarkXPress 2016 main window having a different internal ClassName (30-apr-2016).
•Changes to the generated holidays of sets used in the Variable Dates property of an Insert script line would not be immediately reflected, either in the displayed label in the script editor, or in the All Dates property of that Insert script lines, or in the actual dates when insertions occurred during diary generation (30-apr-2016).
•Fixed the spurious appearance of a warning message, due to a file being currently open in QuarkXPress, that QuarkXPress version 10 and above cannot open files saved in version format 3, 4, 5, or 6. (29-apr-2016)
•Sometimes, after updating the path to a Quark File file, the previews would be lost (25-apr-2016).
•Fixed an obscure bug in the calculation of recurring holidays based on the Hindu Solar calendar, when not using Nakshatras but using an offset (13-apr-2016).
•Fixed a rarely-occurring bug in the evaluation of the length of minicalendar weekday headers, whereby the default value of 0 would really mean a length of 0 (and not the full-length without any truncation), if the minicalendar options dialog had never been opened and closed (Morgan, 11-apr-2016).
•Fixed a minor UI bug in the p-Code Viewing dialog, whereby the grid listing the pages and objects would sometimes not fully repaint (3-apr-2016).
March 31, 2016 (build 16345)
New and Improved
•The Astronomical Data Export function now allows you to choose the depression angle to be used when calculating the length of daylight (as well as the time of local dusk and dawn).
•Improved the Import from Excel dialog by making the meaning of the Import only one column option clearer. The selection highlight now displays only that selected column as highlighted, and the spinner associated with that checkbox cannot have a value lower than that of the minimum number of columns that the Excel file needs to have.
•When exporting Holidays, it is now possible to have each Holidays Set appear on a separate tab of the generated Excel file.
•It is now possible to have macros in the text surrounding Moon phases.
•Whenever a severe scanning/inspection message is issued, instead of having a message dialog pop-up and interrupt the process, Q++Studio now list both severe and simple warning scanning and inspection messages together. This has the advantage that the selected QuarkXPress file is saved as part of the script and you do not have to search for it again after fixing the problem.
•Added a scanning message to alert you if the QuarkXPress template being scanned is one with facing pages that allow odd-numbered pages to be placed on the left, which can cause problems when combined with other templates in a script.
•The export output to PDF is now available, even if some text overflow messages were issued during diary generation.
•Added a message to warn you if a GenTokens token is placed on the first line of a textbox.
•Q++Studio now supports QuarkXPress 2016 (see the online official announcement).
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug which would prevent the displaying of the correct help topic in the macros editor (23-mar-2016).
•Fixed a bug in the main program updater whereby changes to the application server and/or database server, would not be noticed (15-mar-2016).
•Fixed a bug in the Scanning Messages and the Execution Messages dialog whereby the button to display the full help topic corresponding to the currently previewed topic (Letts, 8-mar-2016).
February 29, 2016 (build 16270)
New and Improved
•Improved the usage and appearance of Template Colors in the UI. Template Colors can now be used in GenTokens options. In addition, the 3 template colors now appear in the drop-down lists as color block making it easier to see what these 3 colors correspond to, anywhere in the UI.
•Improved the message and information which appears if you have set a holiday recurrence rule that creates a duplicate date due to conflict checking (for example a holiday lasting 8 days with a move to the next day if any of its dates conflict with another holiday).
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug in the Export Saints and Export Namedays/Saints Exceptions functions, which would prevent their exportation. (Lett's, 26-feb-2016).
•Fixed an extremely rare bug where some leftover fields from the data conversion from the ANSI to the Unicode versions of Q++Studio would cause problems with the Worldwide Public Holidays updater. (Tai Shing, 25-feb-2016).
•Fixed an issue whereby, if the Q++Help was called from one window, it would no longer be accessible if another window had been opened from that first window. (Letts, 5-feb-2016).
•Removed the occurrence of a spurious warning about blank spaces inside Conditional Tokens (Letts, 4-feb-2016).
•Fixed a UI glitch whereby the name of the current script's folder would remain blank in the diary generation progress dialog, if the script had just been created (Letts, 4-feb-2016).
•Fixed a UI glitch whereby one of the buttons of the calendar in the begin rule dialog, for daily or weekly diaries, would be hidden (Letts, 4-feb-2016).
January 31, 2016 (build 16237)
New and Improved
•Added a menu option to open the folder containing the QuarkXPress file related to a given script line.
•Improved the preview of 23/30 and 24/31 characters used in the 5-week options minicalendar preview.
•The Q++Studio Updater now purges old updater files, as part of the update process, if the current update has been completed successfully.
•The Q++Studio Updater now compares the MD5 value of core system files, prior to deciding if one or more need to be downloaded as part of the installation. Before, only the file sizes would be compared, which in some cases of minor changes, would not trigger the download of a changed core system file as part of the update process.
•Added Taskbar progress and status, for Windows 7 and above, in the Q++Studio Worldwide Public Holidays and Q++Studio updaters.
•The Technical Support emails and activity logs now include your TeamViewer ID for an easier remote connection to your PC if needed.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug in the Export One-Time-Dates function, which would prevent the exportation of One-Time-Dates. (JMata, 25-jan-2016).
•Fixed a UI bug in the Holidays Explorer, which would leave the Export button enabled, even when there were no holidays dates to export in the grid. (JMata, 25-jan-2016).
•Fixed a glitch in the Q++Studio Updater whereby the Application Server and Database Server would be downloaded again each time, unnecessarily (20-jan-2016).
•Fixed a bug whereby, in extremely rare cases, an error would occur when displaying the Scanning Messages Dialog, if the message string for a single textbox contained multiple messages on separate lines (Alpha Edition, 19-jan-2016).
Other Years
See also: release notes of the current year and release notes of other years.
Topic 181255, last updated on 15-Jun-2023
