I just added a dialog to FocusWriter for inserting Unicode symbols. The popularity of this feature request surprised me, but after giving it some thought it does make sense. After all, other word processors don’t require you to switch to a separate program just to insert the bullet symbol.

I went a little crazy designing the dialog, as I am wont to do. It started much simpler, just a basic grid of all of the Unicode symbols. However, since there are tens of thousands of symbols it was very hard to navigate, and so I had to come up with some way of filtering what symbols were shown. Unicode defines the writing script and block for every symbol (as well as its general category, but that is useless for filtering as most all symbols are in the same category), so I added those as a sidebar.

I started with a “favorites” bar, but it was annoying to have to remember to add them so I replaced it with a “recently used” bar. I also had to make sure users were able to specify a shortcut for symbols, so that they didn’t have to use the dialog every time they wanted to insert a character! There are three symbols with shortcuts by default: em dash (Ctrl+-), ellipsis (Ctrl+.), and bullet (Ctrl+*); these can all be changed to something else.

There are a few more behind-the-scenes things I am going to do the dialog, but for the most part it is done and in the development source code. Another popular feature finished for the next version!

I have made a bugfix release of FocusWriter, version 1.3.6. This release is mostly to fix major regressions in the emergency cache, but it does also fix a couple of other minor bugs. Thanks go to Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér for adding a Danish translation.

It turns out that I broke the emergency cache for rich text files when I added ODT support. I don’t know how many people were affected, and I am very sorry if it caused anyone data loss. Please report any issues you have. I was only made aware of the problems with the emergency cache thanks to a user who did just that, but I would think other people may have been bitten by this before them.

I changed FocusWriter to force file data to be written to disk on save if supported by the operating system, instead of just flushing the output buffers. This is much safer, but it is also much slower. For now the emergency cache does not force writes to disk because of how large the pauses can be. I did reduce the frequency of the updates to the emergency cache to once every ten minutes.

To help reduce the length of the pauses I have started work on using a background thread for the emergency cache so that it can force data to disk as well; however, I don’t feel comfortable putting an untested behavior change in a release designed to fix the emergency cache and I will leave it for the next feature release.

To reiterate, this is a bugfix release only and does not contain any of the features I have been working on recently (such as line spacing or focus mode). Have no fear, I am still working hard and I hope to make a feature release in a few months.

Yesterday I added the single most requested feature to FocusWriter: users can now set the line spacing per theme (and paragraph spacing, and indent the first line of each paragraph). However, there is one caveat: because I couldn’t find any way to override or merge QTextBlockFormats without modifying documents users will need to reload their files to get the different spacings for each theme. I spent a good deal of time looking around in the source code of Qt trying to find a way to do it, but please let me know if there is something I’ve overlooked! I figured out to directly change the QTextBlockFormats without modifying the documents, so now the different spacings take effect immediately.

I also added another popular request, the ability to choose what text is “focused”. Users can now choose between having one line focused, three lines focused, the current paragraph focused, or (the default) all of the text focused. It was actually quite a bit easier to add than I was expecting it to be because I was able to make use of QTextEdit’s “extra selections” (designed primarily for things like highlighting the current line in a text editor) to set the focused text to opaque, and leave the unfocused text translucent.

I should have announced this sooner, but better late than never I suppose. I will no longer be creating new PowerPC builds of my programs. There are many reasons, but the biggest two are that my iBook G3 finally gave up the ghost, and that Qt has dropped support for PowerPC. I know that this is an inconvenience for some of my users, and I am sorry about that. Still, I hung in there as long as I could, but Apple has moved on.

When I was first adding spell-checking to FocusWriter I tried using enchant, but I had some problems that stopped me. The biggest was that I couldn’t get it working on the Mac. I also couldn’t figure out how to support user installed dictionaries. Because of those issues I decided to instead use hunspell.

Over time users have requested support for languages not supported by hunspell, such as Finnish. I was recently contacted again for that very reason and I decided this time to tackle it. My first approach was just to switch the source code to using enchant on all platforms, which was easy. I solved handling user installed dictionaries by using enchant’s C API and telling the plugin where to look (enchant’s C++ API doesn’t expose setting parameters for plugins as far as I can tell). The tricky part was getting it to work on the Mac. I spent almost a week trying to compile glib and enchant, trying to get them properly linked into a framework, and then getting enchant to detect its plugins. I’m not confident in the end result and not sure it would work on other people’s computers.

Undeterred, I came up with a slightly different approach. I now use enchant on Linux or Windows and use NSSpellChecker on the mac. That only took me a couple of hours to whip together, which made me wonder why I put myself through the pain of trying to get enchant working there in the first place. NSSpellChecker handles finding the words along with checking their spelling, so Mac users should now have inline spell-checking that matches their other programs!

There are still a few rough spots. I can’t find any way to control whether or not NSSpellChecker ignores words with numbers or words all in uppercase. I also can’t find any way to tell it to look in places other than ~/Library/Spelling for user installed dictionaries which is obviously non-portable. And finally it seems NSSpellChecker only scans the list of user installed dictionaries when it is first created, so to use a dictionary after it is installed requires a restart of FocusWriter.

There was only one rough spot on Windows, and that was that I couldn’t get the enchant plugin to find the data files for Voikko (kind of important, since adding Finnish support was what started all of this). I fixed that by modifying the plugin source and adding support for a dictionary path. Just for fun I also changed it to use the thread-safe API of Voikko.

Along the way I took the time to dramatically clean up the internal dictionary API inside of FocusWriter. I had originally written it in a way to hide the fact that there was a shared database of dictionaries, but that made the code kind of awkward and unclear. I think it is a much cleaner design now.

The new code also makes it very easy for me to add the ability to change what language to use for checking the spelling of each document. I have not yet exposed this through the program interface, because I can’t decide how it should be stored. RTF and ODT (I think) both allow you to specify the spell-checking language for a document, but obviously there is no way to embed that in a plain text file. I could just store what language a document is in inside of the session, but that wouldn’t help with file exchange with other word processors.

Despite the headaches and unsolved issues, I have had a lot of fun working on this.