ANN: Leo 4.0 final: An outlining editor

[Edward K. Ream]

Leo 4.0 is now available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/

More than a year in the making, Leo 4.0 is here.

Highlights of 4.0 final:
-----------------------
** Improved and simplified format of derived files.
- Eliminated child indices, extra blank lines and @body sentinels.
- Eliminated @node sentinels that indicate outline structure.
- New @nl and @nonl sentinels indicate where newlines are.
- These changes will largely eliminate unwanted cvs conflicts.

** Greatly improved error handling.
- Reading derived files never alters outline structure or links.
- Read errors leave the outline completely unchanged.
- Broken clone links are gone forever.
- As a result, 4.0 is much safer than all previous versions.

** Full compatibility will previous versions of Leo.
- Leo 4.0 reads all derived files properly, regardless of version.
- Leo writes new-format derived files by default.
- New commands in the read/write menu allow you to explicitly
specify the format of derived files.

* New commands:
- Write 3.x Derived File and Write 4.x Derived File.
- Import Derived File.
- Clear Recent Files.

* Dozens of other improvements, including:
- Better Unicode support.
- New configuration settings.
- Several new plugins.

Quote of the month
------------------
I've written documentation in WordPerfert, Ventura, Word, PageMaker,
and FrameMaker and even though they create wonderfully looking and
useful documents, they've never been able to do what I've been
looking for. HTML, compiled help files, and later PDF came closer,
but still not there. I think I've found it in Leo, a way to make a
"living" document...A document built out of discrete parts that can be
re-organized on the fly to meet the needs of a varying audience.
Being a convert for less than a day I've still got a lot to learn,
but just the possibility of keeping system maintenance scripts in the
IT manual is mind boggling. -- David Nichols

What is Leo?
------------
- A programmer's editor, an outlining editor and a flexible browser.
- A literate programming tool, compatible with noweb and CWEB.
- A data organizer and project manager. Leo provides multiple views
of projects within a single outline.
- Fully scriptable using Python. Leo saves its files in XML format.
- Portable. leo.py is 100% pure Python.
- Open Software, distributed under the Python License.

Leo requires Python 2.1 or above and tcl/tk 8.3 or above.
Leo works on Linux, Windows and MacOs X.

Links:
------
Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
Home: http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458
CVS: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=3458
Wiki: http://leo.hd1.org/

Edward K. Ream
October 17, 2003

 

[Edward K. Ream]

Things have not gone real smoothly for the 4.0 release:

1. Somehow the wrong version of leosetup.exe got associated with 4.0 final
at

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458

People thinking they were downloading the 4.0 final version of this file
would instead get the 4.0 beta 1 version! I have just uploaded and retested
this file by downloading it and reinstalling it. All seems good (for now).
I believe this was a SF problem...

2. The 4.0 final release contains a crasher that has caused problems for
some people when opening or saving new .leo files. To fix this, make the
following change. If you are having problems with Leo you will probably
want to make this change outside of Leo.

In line 609 of leoFileCommands.py change:

language = name.replace(name,"/","")

to:

language = name.replace("/","")

3. There have been Unicode problems when writing leoConfig.txt reported by
people using the cp936 text encoding.

I hope to fix all these problems in a 4.0.1 release due this week sometime.

Edward