- Sip goes OLE
- SipLedger
- Current license levels
- Planned unified version numbering
Dear Score user,
The recently announced SIP version checking feature and FreewareServicePack policy
it is now possible to make it a lot easier to
upgrade. All programs (freeware and licensed) have been changed such that file
selection is even faster thanks to the Windows OLE technology.
Sip goes OLE
Introduction
All SIP utilities that take one or more input files have a 'Select file(s)' button.
These buttons bring the user to various ways to select files using point and click, or drag a selection.
The result of such selection is always a 'names' file which Score users know from PAGE extraction.
A new feature is now added to make file selection for SIP utilities even faster.
How to use it
Make a selection from the Explorer, drag the selection to a 'Select file(s)' button on any SIP utility and drop the selection there. The names file is created instantly.
And it does a bit more. The types of files that Score engravers handle with SIP are one of these:
- MUS (or any other suffix) created by Score or a Score utility or a SIP utility or a third party utility;
- EPS created by Score or Scorlas, or created by Sibelius;
- XML created by Dolet as a Finale plug-in or SharpEye;
Thanks to a Microsoft technique called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), this dragging can be used between applications and for us, the drag-drop between Explorer and SIP is now provided. When you hit the 'Select file(s)' button with dragged file selection, the cursor will change from a 'cannot drop here' to a 'can drop here' mouse pointer.
If by accident you drag the wrong type of file to a button (ie. an EPS file to SipXref which only likes MUS files), then an error message is given. At drop time, each utility checks that the files have the correct internal structure.
It also checks that you do not drag a Scorlas created EPS into SipSib as that only accepts Sibelius generated EPS, or vice versa.
Technical information
The names file for Score MUS is always called NAMES.SIP, for SipSib it is NAMESEPS.SIP and for SipXML2Score it is NAMESXML.SIP.
Note that the names file contains short (DOS) filenames for Score MUS and Score EPS files while for SipSib and SipXML2Score, the names are in the long (Windows) format.
The program which does the file selection with panels is SipNames. The one handling the OLE technique is called SipOLE. These two programs can not be executed by themselves.
To assure the Score MUS file type with OLE, the whole file is scanned, so if you drag-drop 50 files, this will take a second or so. To assure that files are Score produced EPS, the first three records are read. To validate SipSib file selection, only the first three lines of the EPS file read while bypassing the binary preamble if there is one. To qualify input as XML, the first line is read and it can handle UTF-8 and UTF-16 preambles as well as pure text.
Each 'Select file(s)' button now has a tooltip explaining the new feature.
Third party products
When you have installed ACCS by Tom Brodhead, the SIP interface to it, SipACCS, also allows the drag-drop.
When LASCOR by Sergei Lebedev is integrated into SIP, the filename drag-drop is not supported as the selection is included by its own panel.
SipLedger
This freeware program which controls the width of ledger lines in Score output is now systematically distributed in the FreewareServicePack.
Current license levels
Licensed users for which this is applicable need to download the following:
Planned unified version numbering
Versions, upgrades, builds, releases? These terms in the SIP context usually mean there is some new feature or program fix. It is not always
easy to distinguish between the terms and it is therefore planned to revise the version identification. The format of versions will be as Microsoft
uses for its module - four numbers separated by dots.
This scheme is already used by the SipVersion program.
To make it simpler for the users, panel headers will also show these numbers. The last group is what we have come to know as the 'build'.
An example would be SipSib 3.0.0.108 which is version 3 build 108.