Announcing 4.8 Release

Thank you everyone who helped us test Bloom 4.8 while it was in Beta. It is now the Release. :tada:

Here’s what’s new in 4.8:

:star: Talking Book Text Playback Order. You can now control the playback order of all the text boxes on a page, including comic book bubbles.

Improved performance with very large books. Some of you are creating terrific picture dictionaries with Bloom. These run into the hundreds of pages. However, the page thumbnail list gets very, very slow in these books. In 4.8, we’ve re-written that page thumbnail list from scratch, so that it is now much easier to edit these huge books.

Original Title

Bloom now has a way to declare the title of the original book upon which your translation is based, in the Credits page. It will automatically determine this if it can, otherwise you can type it in.

Added a new “longpress” character for showing diacritics in alphabet books

If you hold down “o”, the menu of special characters that pops up now offers ◌. This is useful in showing diacritics without arbitrarily showing a base character to show it with.

:star: Widget Activities (Feature Request)

You can now embed little interactive activities in digital publications (web, Bloom Reader, RAB App). Many of these widgets already exist (they work with Apple’s IBooks and the Kotobee book software). You may also be able to make your own or commission a programmer. If this approach gains popularity, we’ll have a set of them to share within the Bloom community. To learn about “book widgets”, please see this blog. To enable this feature, you need to go to Collection Tab/Settings/Advanced Program Settings and tick “Show Experimental Features”. Bloom requires that the widget be a zipped set of files ending in “.wdgt”. The files must include a file named “index.html”. We will be making this a bit easier in Bloom 5.0.

Really complex scripts

Bloom 4.8 is available in two versions. “Bloom CS 4.8”, supports those scripts that require the latest graphite font rendering. We are still working out some 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 4.7 Release, Bloom should automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise, you can get 4.8 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.

That’s wonderful Re: Improved performance with very large books.