Upgrade from Xmetal Author 4.5

[tknee]

Hi

I am currently using XMetal Author 4.5 on Windows XP. I do not require DITA standard support. Given this, what are the advantages to upgrading from version 4.5 to version 5.5 Author Essentials?

Thanks

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[Derek Read]

Please see the read-me for 5.5 release contained in the zip file attached to the following post:
http://forums.xmetal.com/index.php?topic=108.0

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[dcramer]

Here are the things I know about that would be of interest to a non-DITA user (starting at 4.6)

In one of those releases…possibly 5.0. I couldn't check because its readme's new features section sends you back to xmetal.com which brings us to justsystems.com… 🙂
* You undo history is no longer reset when you save a document.

In 5.5 a couple of new APIs:
* 'xml': a DOMElement extension property that returns a string representation for the DOM element and all its child elements.
* 'ShowEditButtonInAttributeInspector': a _Document method that causes the Attribute Inspector to show an ellipsis (“…”) pushbutton within the grid attribute value cell for a given attribute. The new On_Edit_Attribute_From_AI event-macro will fire whenever the user clicks on the ellipsis pushbutton.

Probably some of that Vista stuff applies to everyone.

If there's anything else that applies to non-DITA users that I've missed, I'd be interested in seeing it. It's quite a bit a of work to sort through all those readmes.

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[tknee]

Thanks David and Derek

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[Derek Read]

A huge portion of the 5.5 release dealt with Vista compatibility, so although it takes up basically one line in the readme it was probably about 90% of the effort (these things are subjective). Over 400 issues were addressed with the 5.5 release across 4 products that share code or interact with each other in some way (XMetaL Author Enterprise, XMetaL Author Essential, XMAX, XMetaL Developer, and XMetaL Reviewer), including many introduced directly by the effort to make the product compatible with Vista.

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