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 2017.
See also: release notes of the current year and release notes of other years.
December 31, 2017 (build 18575)
New and Improved
•It is now possible to display the list of scripts which use a specific Moon Data Source or Sun Data Source.
•The Frame size of Minicalendars and Macros Resulting Actions can now be specified to 2 decimals (eg. at 0.25 pts for example).
•The contents of the QuarkXPress Rescue Folder are now automatically attached to your technical support emails.
•Q++Studio is compatible with the recently-released QuarkXPress update QuarkXPress 2017.11 (13.1.1 build 29230).
•The installer for the Q++Studio commercial version of TeamViewer now installs TeamViewer 13.
Fixed and Corrected
•The help topic displayed in the Scanning Messages Dialog for the Box Left is Negative warning was not the correct one; the help topic 178230 was the one actually being displayed (26-dec-2017).
•Added code to gracefully handle stray Recurring Holidays that do not belong to any Holidays Set during the updating of worldwide public holidays and at the end of holidays generation (24-dec-2017).
•Fixed a bug which inserted a blank row when manually inserting a one-time-date (11-dec-2017).
•Fixed a bug in the SQL code of the Templates Not Used By Any Script data report, whereby the query would fail in the extremely rare case when the current database was the merged product of 2 databases, with 2 "Do Not Delete" templates, for example (Burde, 8-dec-2017).
November 30, 2017 (build 18479)
New and Improved
•Optimized the time needed to open and save a script, in particular over slow internet connections. Time taken to open or save a script is now less than 30% of what it was before.
•The :dd Minicalendar Modifier can now be used in conjunction with macros minicalendar modifiers.
•Improved the Exception to Holiday Rule dialog; now, when opening this dialog to specify exceptions to the currently selected holiday rule, the date of the current holiday for the year of now plus 90 days is now pre-selected (previously the pre-selected date was today's date shifted to next year).
•Improved the speed of processing color changes by removing spurious duplicate calls to change the same color twice.
•Added more informative feedback when loading and saving macros over slow internet connections.
•It is now possible to apply many of QuarkXPress' paragraph attributes to the result of a SARA or Macro (left, right, first indents, leading, space before, space after, horizontal alignment, ...).
•SARAs now have a new set of Search Options which allow you to specify, for each individual SARA, if it should only be performed on textboxes that have text overflow, and if they should be performed after the Boxfit or Boxgrow tokens.
•Added the possibility of showing past years' one-time-dates in the Holidays Manager (by default, to save on network traffic and response time, one-time-dates from the past are filtered out).
•It is now possible to insert daily grids, as well as weekly grids, with the Month Fit option and Outside Days Formatting Options making the creation of daily diaries with monthly inserts, where the 1st of the month must always be in a specific position (usually at the top of the right page, but not necessarily), much easier (no need to add a macro to all tokens and customize one of the "skip days" macro.
Fixed and Corrected
•The macro functions IsInCurrentMonth, IsInCurrentSpread and IsInCurrentWeek would give incorrect results when used in a macro embedded in a minicalendar (Lecas, 23-nov-2017).
•Fixed an erroneous occurrence of the message that one of the built-in, but deletable, colors of a QuarkXPress document, had been deleted (19-nov-2017).
•Fixed a minor UI glitch in the GridOptions editor, whereby a pre-selected color in the Monthly Outside Days options would not be pre-selected when re-opening the Monthly Outside Days editor (14-nov-2017).
•Fixed some minor UI glitches in the Holidays (display) property editor (6-nov-2017).
October 31, 2017 (build 18374)
New and Improved
•References to text files located in sub-folders of the Server folder, as used in the Initial Conditions of Macros, are now transparently updated if these files were physically moved to the new version's folder, but the Macro's Initial Conditions remained with a reference to a previous version folder.
•The warning messages about the number of @ markers in a Minicalendar (here, here and here) are no longer being generated if your minicalendar is using macros to convert either of the @ $$ w# markers.
•Q++Studio is compatible with the 2 just-released QuarkXPress updates; QuarkXPress 2016.23 and QuarkXPress 2017.10.
•You can now specify different text/tokens before/after multiple holidays to handle the cases when the same holiday runs for many consecutive days, and you wish to merge these dates into one line, as occurs in duration holiday tokens.
•Whenever the Macro function List_LoadFromFile cannot find the file it is asked to open, it now looks for that same file in the server folders of previous versions of Q++Studio (such as QppShare, Q++Studio Server, and Q++ServerXE2) and uses that file automatically, while issuing a warning message so that you may eventually correct the path.
•When you reselect the Quark File of a Quark File scriptline, the folder of the current file is now pre-selected.
Fixed and Corrected
•The calculation of the current script's year property would sometimes not be updated prior to evaluating the :year minicalendar modifier (JMata, 29-oct-2017).
•The run-time message 176240 is now no longer generated spuriously due to the use of Filter or No Duplicates Holiday Symbols Display Options (29-oct-2017).
•In the case of a template showing more than one full year of minicalendars, the current week number marker w# formatting could be applied more than once (Alpha Edition, 20-oct-2017).
•Fixed an incorrect offset in the calculation of the date used to evaluate the macro conversion of the w# minicalendar markers (Zettler, 20-oct-2017).
•In some cases, selecting any of the advanced text formatting attributes introduced in QuarkXPress 2017, without any other attribute change (such as bold, italic, font color, font size, ...) would result in the specified advanced text formatting attributes being ignored (Alpha Edition, 19-oct-2017).
•Fixed a bug in the calculation of Moon Lore Rules, whereby the time periods for the "Entering" option of bug with the “entering” option for the sections “Moon Phases”, “Moon Periods”, “Moon in Zodiac” and “Sun in Zodiac” would actually correspond to the period when the Moon or Sun was "Leaving" these configurations (Alpha Edition, 16-oct-2017).
•Hints would appear above Edit and ButtonEdit controls, even if the text in them was not as long as, or longer, than the control itself (14-oct-2017).
•Single-Line Diary Generation now only generates the current script line, even if the same template is used multiple times in the Script (11-oct-2017).
•The Templates Menu sub-menus to open the Quark files of the various sections would remain disabled under certain circumstances (Brepols, 10-oct-2017).
•Adding new Recurring Holidays was not possible (Letts, 10-oct-2017).
•Text Stroking would not be applied as part of Minicalendar Options and in some cases the previously-set values for Advanced Text Formatting would not re-appear in the editor when one tried to edit those values again (Brepols, 6-oct-2017).
•DiaryGridLine Saras would only search through the first 14 pages of a template, and ignore the other pages if present (the current limit is 24 pages per template). This did not affect Global Saras (Zettler, 5-oct-2017).
•Fixed a bug in the handling of multiple sequential insert blocks in Front Pages and/or Back Pages (Quo Vadis, 4-oct-2017).
September 30, 2017 (build 18256)
New and Improved
•Corrected many places in the documentation which referred to the macro functions FindHolidayOnDate and Reset_FindHolidayOnDate instead of FindNextHolidayOnDate and Reset_FindNextHolidayOnDate, respectively.
•It is now possible to use $n to indicate the Nth capture group of a regular expression in the search string.
•The behavior of the Apply to Entire Contents of Textbox minicalendar option has been changed so that it is applied to the textbox first, before any further specific formatting (such as outside days or holidays) may be applied to individual @ date markers. Before, the selection of the Apply to Entire Contents of Textbox would quash any other specific formatting selection.
•Q++Studio supports version 13.1 of QuarkXPress 2017 which is slated for release on October 6, 2017.
•The new Holidays Changes Logs allows you to see what changes have been made to Recurring Holidays and Holidays Sets.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug introduced in early August which would affect Boxfit tokens when using QuarkXPress 8 or above (Brunnen, 25-sep-2017).
•The values selected for the Offer to save OPF of new scripts in Execution Preferences would be ignored in cases with multiple databases (JMata, 15-sep-2017).
•Fixed a bug which would prevent the display of Outside Days minicalendar options in some cases (Filofax, 11-sep-2017).
•Added code to graciously handle, during Holidays Synchronization, holidays sets linked to sample world holidays sets that no longer exist (Alpha Edition, 7-sep-2017).
•Added code to prevent the creation of spurious server folders (Blueline, 1-sep-2017).
August 31, 2017 (build 18152)
New and Improved
•The Holidays Synchronization can now be done for all sets that are based on the same country of the Worldwide Public Holidays Database, allowing you, for example, to synchronize all your sets that are based on Germany, before moving to any of your sets that are based on another country of the Worldwide Public Holidays Database.
•Extended the [sw] Token GridOptions to make them more flexible and independent of the value of the DiaryGridLine's WeekStart.
•Added more suffix options to the start of week tokens so that the week number may be postponed if the Monday (or Monday and one or more weekdays) is an aeiou-holidays and/or a Moon phase.
•Added Template Page Attributes Tokens which can be used with Zap Tokens or Conditional Tokens to keep or delete some elements depending on the position of the page on which the current Page Token is located, such as first generated page of template, first generated spread of template, last generated page of template, last generated spread of template, facing page is from a different template, etc.
•Improvements to the UI of the Holidays Manager; the dialog has been expanded and some key fields have been changed to display more information, such as the full text of a holiday name, including holiday name variations, in the hint, without the need to select and display that holiday.
•It is now possible to filter the list of Recurring Holidays and One-Time-Dates.
•The Worldwide Public Holidays Updater displays the database being updated for users who are connected to multiple databases.
•The placement of recurring holidays based on the Islamic calendar in the Holidays Manager has been improved to take into account the time of the year (ie. if a given Muslim public holiday for the current year is in the past, then this holiday will be placed in a position that reflects its next occurrence the following year). In addition, this floating placement is now updated on the fly (previously it was only updated whenever the holiday rule was saved/modified).
•Added the option of narrowing-down to the search results in the Search Footer of the One-Time-Dates grid.
•The searched for and replacement text of SARAs, as well as the resulting text of Macros, can now be set to use the non-breaking text attribute.
•Added new textbox resizing macro functions to specify the height and width of a textbox as well as the possibility to increase any of the top-left-bottom-right positions of a textbox without knowing its initial value. These functions now support rotated textboxes.
•It is now possible to have multiple conditions in Zap Tokens and Conditional Tokens so that the zap/conditional action is triggered only if all the conditions are true.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed the occurrence of message 176075 for cases when the GenTokens Line Ending was not one of hard returns, soft returns, formatting or Xtags.(31-aug-2017).
•The Outside Days Override minicalendar tokens modifiers were not being handled properly in some cases (Filofax, 30-aug-2017).
•Slogans that contained soft or hard returns would not display these returns in the Slogans Manager (Blueline, 30-aug-2017).
•The messages 15021 and 172560 are now only issued for Cyclical and Run Once Only slogans sets where Slogans are used sequentially, and not based on a date (JMata, 20-aug-2017).
•The More... button used, among other things, to copy one-time-dates between sets,was being hidden by another control (11-aug-2017)
•Added code to force a full recalculation of the output file after processing SARAs, to avoid false text overflow messages (JMata, 2-aug-2017).
July 31, 2017 (build 17970)
New and Improved
•Added a token to display the current page side, allowing for the use of a single template to show left or right aligned page elements depending of the output page side.
•Q++Studio supports the newly released version 12.2.2 of QuarkXPress 2016.
•It is now possible to specify that images inserted from Holidays, One-time-dates, Slogans and Macros, can now be set to be transparent (for black & white and vector images) when using QuarkXPress 2016 or above.
•Added the Offset from Script Year Minicalendar Modifier to base the reference year of a minicalendar on the year of the Script, allowing you to design grids where the range of dates spanned by its minicalendars remains the same regardless of the dates contained in the current page/spread.
•Added the macro function PeekTokenValue which allows you to evaluate a token (or a string containing one or more tokens) on a given date, as does the macro function EvalToken, but without any side-effects encountered during the evaluation of tokens, such as conversion to a symbol font or call to be replaced by an XPress Tag.
•Improved the user interface of the Initial Conditions tab of the Macros Options dialog, allowing more space to display Input Variables as well as allowing the use of the Multi-Line Text Editor to set and modify the initial value of string variables.
•Q++Studio supports the newly released version 13.0.2 of QuarkXPress 2017.
•Implemented the ISNA/FCNA Muslim calendar used for North America.
•Initial release of Hebrew support in Q++Studio.
•Increased the maximum value of the offset field in the Rule above/Rule below Options dialog, which were previously limited to a maximum value of 10mm.
•The Q++Studio Documentation is now also available as a PDF manual.
•Added the :fou minicalendar token modifer which can be used to to correctly display 4 week vertical minicalendar dates, when you may be using a 4-week minicalendar, a 5-week minicalendar and a 6-week minicalendar together with different tab positions to have the first and last weeks of all minicalendars justified or aligned.
•Zap tokens can now include macro tokens.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug which would treat minicalendar @ and $$ tokens as being in the current month if they were of the same month but not the same year as the date of the minicalendar token itself (Blueline, 20-july-2017).
•Some special character markers generated from inside a call to the macro function EvalToken would not be processed fully (JMata, 18-july-2017).
•Tokens generated recursively from a token with a date offset (for example tokens inside a GenTokens with a date offset, such as [1GenTokens1:-21d]) would not be evaluated using the correct date (Diarpell, 17-july-2017).
•In some cases, the last changes to an output file due to a SARA would not be taken into account when converting the output file to PDF as part of the diary generation (JMata, 16-july-2017).
•Text being initially displayed in the Multi-Line Text Editor would show a spurious return character at the end of the displayed string (15-july-2017).
•Fixed the spurious, time-wasting, search for Arabic and Hebrew text in scripts which do not contain any Arabic or Hebrew (11-july-2017).
•Fixed a UI glitch in the Minicalendar Preview of the Minicalendar Options dialog, whereby the specification of a character to replace outside days would be lost in the preview when changing the type of outside days visibility option (Zettler, 7-july-2017)
•Fixed a bug in the triggering of the Zap Layer in minicalendar token modifiers (Zettler, 5-july-2017)
June 30, 2017 (build 17773)
New and Improved
•Q++Studio supports the newly released version 13.0.1 of QuarkXPress 2017.
•Improved the default Generation Options dialog so that options that cannot be set as defaults are clearly identified as such, with their default value also clearly visible.
•The Open a Recently Scanned GridTemplate sub-menus are now individually enabled or disabled depending if the related QuarkXPress file exists or not.
•The Clear Template Link option available when right-clicking on a DiaryGridTemplate in the Script Editor, is now also available for Quark Pages to sever the link to any Quark File pages.
•Increased the number of possible GenTokens indices from 12 to 18.
•It is now possible to edit the path in the Template Properties dialog directly, without the need to select the file in the Save As dialog.
•The Saras results dialog now allows message results of 512 characters instead of the previous limit of 200 characters.
•The default filtering for all text fields in all Advanced Data Grids is now "contains" rather than "equals".
•Added two new options, Skip First Occurrence and Skip Last Occurrence to the Insert Dates (repeating) script line property to better handle cases when you want to have the first Insert handled differently than the rest and/or you want no insertion to occur for January of the following year.
•The tech support module now breaks down email attachments so that they are limited to 5MB per email.
•It is now possible to display holiday names and edit them in a text editor.
•Added code to more graciously handle cases when the XPress Tags used (in GenTokens, Minicalendar Shading, ...) is improperly formatted and QuarkXPress 2016 and 2017 get stuck.
•Added even more information to the messages being generated if one of the colors, H&J's, text style sheets or paragraph style sheets, of the GridTemplates and plain Quark files of the Script being generated has the same name as another of the colors, H&J's, text style sheets or paragraph style sheets already defined in the output file, but is defined differently.
•The scope of the message There are X undefined pages has been improved so that the message is only a hint if the number of undefined pages is below 32, and a warning if the number of undefined pages is 32 or above.
•The calculation of Hindu public holidays of the paraviddha type (such as Deepavali and Diwali) has been improved by the inclusion of the latest results on the subject of Deepavali/Diwali calculation research as presented at the recent International Conference on History of World Calendars and Calendar Making organized by the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS).
Fixed and Corrected
•Some of the default Generation Options would not be applied to newly created scripts (JMata, 24-june-2017).
•Fixed the appearance of a spurious pipe character when using the Arial, Times or Courier 23/30 and 24/31 minicalendar options (Blueline, 22-june-2017)
•Fixed a bug in the copying of GenTokens Options of index 10 and above (Blueline, 22-june-2017)
•The length of the path of Quark Files was being truncated at 128 characters instead of 254 characters when being saved (Alpha Edition, 20-june-2017)
•Fixed the uninformative appearance of the messages GridTemplate is a Quark X file and Quark File is a Quark X file when the Quark file being tested was open and being locked by QuarkXPress (19-june-2017)
•The underlying QuarkXPress document of GridTemplates and Quark Files would not be attached to technical support emails (Letts, 2-june-2017)
May 31, 2017 (build 17644)
New and Improved
•Q++Studio is compatible with the official release version of QuarkXPress 2017.
•Added left/right page and even/odd page as GenTokens Special Cases Conditions.
•Detailed messages are now generated if one of the colors, H&J's, text style sheets or paragraph style sheets, of the GridTemplates and plain Quark files of the Script being generated has the same name as another of the colors, H&J's, text style sheets or paragraph style sheets already defined in the output file, but is defined differently.
•The result of Conditional Tokens and Macros have been extended with the possibility of specifying that, all the objects on the same page and same layer as the textbox containing the Conditional Token or Macro Token, without the need to group all the objects of that page, as was the case before.
•Minor UI tweaks to the SaraSets Manager: expanded the edit box used to specify the name of a SarasSet and changed the hint text that appears over the database navigation buttons, to make them more intuitive for non-database specialists.
•Added more details in message 180975 (Pasted box in wrong place) and created a new, lesser level, message 181435 (Fixed objects of page in wrong position), along with the ID of the template and name of the QuarkXPress file concerned and more detailed help topics on how to address these 2 messages.
Fixed and Corrected
•The Holidays Wizard button would not be visible when creating a new recurring holiday, until that holiday had been saved once (Alpha Edition, 15-may-2017).
•Fixed a minor bug in the Database Server which would prevent the remote web access to its management console (7-may-2017).
April 30, 2017 (build 17563)
New and Improved
•Q++Studio is compatible with the latest, final release candidate version of QuarkXPress 2017.
•It is now possible to import scripts, including all the related holidays, saints, saras, macros, slogans, ..., from one database and/or server to another.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed the sometime spurious appearance of message 180975 (Pasted box in wrong place) when using QuarkXPress 2016 and above, as well as the missing decimals in the stated positions when the message is warranted (Blueline, 28-apr-2017).
•Fixed a UI glitch whereby the Initial Conditions editor of the Macros Options dialog would appear slightly off from its normal position (Blueline, 27-apr-2017).
•When selecting a specific holiday, to be used for a recurring holiday conflict rule, if the previously-selected holiday rule was in a different Holidays Set than the one currently selected, then the previously-selected holiday would not be pre-selected (19-apr-2017).
March 31, 2017 (build 17477)
New and Improved
•Reduced and clarified the number of design-time messages that are displayed when the Quark version of a GridTemplate differs from the version of QuarkXPress currently used and/or the version of QuarkXPress used to scan it the last time.
•Added more informative messages when using QuarkXPress versions 8-9-10-2015-2016 and an attribute/feature not available in that version of QuarkXPress (such as regular expressions for QuarkXPress 8-2015, and text stroking, and text background shading and framing in QuarkXPress 8-2016).
•It is now possible to have a figure/digit space in front of single-digit dates in minicalendars.
•Added a column in the select saras dialog indicating if each Sara is selected/activated.
•It is now possible to override the default order in which various minicalendar formatting options are applied to the dates in a minicalendar.
•Q++Studio supports QuarkXPress 2017 whose release, later this year, was announced on March 1st, including text stroking, text background shading and framing in Macros, Grid Options, MiniCalendars and SARAs.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed a bug in the processing of regular expressions in SARAs when using lookbehind and lookahead with text that was changed, whereby the replacement text would be the searched text (28-mar-2017).
•The status indicator for the total number of Sara Hits, and to a lesser extent text overflows, would sometime not be fully updated until the generated output file was saved and QuarkXPress shut itself down (27-mar-2017).
•The presence of any of the characters {}|= in a SARA , in particular in a SARAs regular expression, could confuse the SARA's processing (12-mar-2017).
•The list of most-recently-used scripts would not always be updated immediately (Letts, 10-mar-2017).
•Fixed a bug in the generation of PlaceHolder pages under QuarkXPress 2016 and 2017 (Brepols, 10-mar-2017).
•Re-scanning and re-inspecting multiple Quark files could set the current script status from "needs saving" to "does not need saving" meaning that you would not be prompted to save your script before closing it (Letts, 7-mar-2017)
•Issuing a warning that a template page is totally empty of textboxes would cause an error if the very first page of the very first DiaryGridLine of a script had no textboxes at all (Alpha Edition, 3-mar-2017).
February 28, 2017 (build 17252)
New and Improved
•Improved the removal of tags in the Help Preview shown when listing diary generation messages and scanning messages. Each topic title now appears in a consistent manner, and all the spurious blank lines have been removed.
•You can now use regular expressions to search in SARAs (using QuarkXPress 2016 and above).
•You can now use regular expressions to search in Holidays Sets, Holidays, One-Time-Dates, Saints and Namedays as well as Slogans.
•Minicalendars' Week Start can now be set to be any of the days of the week (previously the choice was restricted to Saturday, Sunday, and Monday).
•Improved the conditions under which the message Minicalendar contains an unexpected number of @ markers would be generated. This message is no longer generated if the number of @ markers is 37, the minimum number of markers needed in a minicalendar.
•Improved the interface of the Sara Hits Dialog which lists the SARAs which were triggered, and on which page and textbox, during diary generation. The details of the SARA are now listed on the group header row, when listing the SARA results grouped by SARA.
•Improved the user interface of the Advanced Data Grid used in many parts of Q++Studio. You can now use predefined inline filtering operators, which are available for each different type of displayed column data .
•It is now possible to use Outside Days Formatting Options in cases when you are inserting weekly grids with the Month Fit option.
Fixed and Corrected
•Tokens embedded in a minicalendar with a WeekStart modifier would use the Week Start option of Grid Options instead of the Week Start option of the Minical Options. This could cause problems if the minicalendars of a template used a different week start than the template itself (Warwick, 15-feb-2017).
•After using the Slogans Libraries dialog the Slogans Libraries tables could remain filtered until the next restart of the program (JMata, 5-feb-2017).
January 31, 2017 (build 17129)
New and Improved
•Added the possibility of also purging external QuarkXPress preferences.
•Improved version of the DLL which connects to the NASA/JPL database for astronomical calculations; • improved positions for Mercury, Uranus and the Praesepe (aka. Beehive) Cluster, • closest approaches are no longer listed on the same day as a lunar occultation occurs, • calculations take into account the leap second of December 31, 2016, • minor fixes to heliacal functions, • new algorithm for the calculation of Delta T, the difference between Universal Time (UT) and Terrestrial Time (TT), based on recently-released research and covering Delta T from 721 BCE to 2016 CE, based on historical observations of eclipses and occultations, as well as a parabolic function extrapolation for epochs beyond this time range.
•Official launch of the public beta of the new Premium XV4 64-bit version of Q++Studio.
Fixed and Corrected
•Fixed an incorrect warning message that could sometimes be issued if 2 users started Q++Studio at exactly the same time.
•Fixed a UI glitch in the message that is displayed if your Preferences are to automatically re-open the last script you worked on, when starting Q++Studio, but someone else is already using that script.
•Fixed a few minor (less than 8 bytes) memory leaks in the determination of which constellation an astronomical position corresponds to.
Other Years
See also: release notes of the current year and release notes of other years.
Topic 181775, last updated on 18-Mar-2023
