Thank you everyone who helped us test Bloom 4.9 while it was in Beta. It is now the Release.
Here’s what’s new in 4.9:
Edit Tab
Bloom now makes much better use of your computer’s memory. You should be able to work much longer, with much larger books, before encountering any memory limitations.
Talking Book Segmentation. You can now type a vertical bar (|) to break up the recording of long sentences. This also works for splitting audio that you import. After recording or splitting, you will need to remove these vertical bars so that they don’t show when you publish the book.
Fix: The Talking Book tool no longer treats “Myanmar signed little section” (U+104A) as a sentence-ending character.
The list of page sizes now includes 13cm Square as one of the possibilities (Feature Request). This requires printing with A3 paper if you wish to produce booklets using this new page size. (Each printing would create 3 copies of the booklet.)
When you open a large book, the thumbnail representing the current page is now automatically scrolled into view.
In the Comic Tool, you can now set custom background colors for text boxes.
In the Comic Tool, you can now click a button to duplicate the current bubble.
Copy Text from Source Bubble
We have added a Copy button to the Source Bubble. (Feature Request)
Publish Tab
Login to BloomLibrary is now through bloomlibrary.org, which allows you to just click the Google button to use your Google identity (include sil.org accounts, for those of you who have that).
You can now provide a custom thumbnail for Epub publications. Place a file labeled epub-thumbnail.png in the books folder.
We can now provide custom “Full Bleed” layouts to Enterprise projects that need edge-to-edge printing at commercial print shops.
Upgrading
If you are using Bloom 4.8 Release, Bloom should automatically ask to update itself. Otherwise, you can get 4.9 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.