Announcing 4.7 Release

Thank you everyone who helped us test Bloom 4.7 while it was in Beta. It is now the Release.

Here’s what’s new in 4.7:

4.7

Edit Tab

:star:Import Audio (Feature Request)

:star:Comic Tool (Feature Request). Look out world, here come beautiful comics in minority languages!

Known limitation in this release: If you turn a comic book into a Talking Book, it will play back in the reverse of the order that the bubbles were created. This is fixed in Bloom 4.8 beta, which should be available by the 3rd week of May.

Known limitation in this release: There is not yet a way to have an exclamation bubble with a tail.

Known limitation in this release: When the Comic Book tool is visible, you can’t change the image underneath the comic bubbles. Just close the tool, set the image, then re-open the tool.

:star:Digital Comic Book Template. Use this when starting a new comic designed for screens.

:star:For some complex scripts, the size of language text in the Decodable Reader was too small. We added a font-size chooser under Settings:Book Making:Special Script Settings:Font size when displayed in tools.

Publish Tab

In Publish: Bloom Reader screen, you can now decide which of the languages in a book you want to publish.

In all publish screens, if a book uses Bloom’s new Content Licensing system, Bloom will prevent publishing a language that has not yet been licensed for that book. This will prevent accidental violation of license agreements in which a publisher needs to limit which languages are published. For example, they may allow minority language translations to be Creative Commons licensed while relying on sales of the original English version for company revenue.

In Publish: ePUB, you can now add a summary/description to the ePUB metadata.

We added a way to export a single mp3 file for each page of the book. Right click on the left bar, then choose “Export audio files, 1 per page”.

Collection Tab

We simplified book thumbnails to just show the image on the cover.

We have created a New Problem Report Dialog which is both more convenient for users and should help us get the information we need to be of help.

Other

:star: Really complex scripts. Bloom 4.7 is available in two versions. The new version, “Bloom CS 4.7”, supports those scripts that require the latest graphite font rendering. We are still working out some performance kinks in Bloom CS, so only use it if you need it are are willing to help us find bugs.

Upgrading

If you are using Bloom 4.6 Release, Bloom should automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise, you can get 4.7 from the Bloom downloads page. As usual, you can have the Release & Beta versions installed at the same time , and open books in either one.

If you have any questions about these new features, please ask them here on this forum. If you find bugs, please use Help:Report a Problem and include your book. If you need to use email, please send to issues@bloomlibrary.org.

Wonderful! Thank you for all your work on this!
I am wondering for the import pre-recorded audio feature whether it is possible to pre-record the entire book and import that? Or only a single page at a time?

Unfortunately not. Since Bloom pages can contain many text boxes arranged in complex and unpredictable ways – think, for example, multiple Comic speech bubbles – it is impossible to import audio for an entire book.

When importing a recording, the target is a single text box on a single page.

That is not to say that you couldn’t record the audio for your book in a single recording session. In fact, that is a really good idea to get a nice consistent voice recording. I’d recommend recording in WAV format, then edit in Audacity or your favourite editing software. Then simply select portions of the audio which correspond to each text box in your Bloom book and export these in mp3 format. Then import them one-by-one into your Bloom book.

By the way, I should let you know that Bloom 4.8 has just been released.

Happy book making!