Notes on (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.10.0:

Changes that were available in the that release:

• Fixed the bugs described in the 'Bugs/Problems in (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.9.1' section (see below).
• Added Polish language support, thanks to a patch from Dominik 'Chiron' Derlatka.
• Added Dutch language support, thanks to a patch from Ewald Beekman.
• Added Romanian language support, thanks to a patch from Claudiu Costin.
• Added Danish language support, thanks to a patch from Kenneth Geisshirt.
• Eliminated certain compile-time warnings that occurred in a GCC 3.4.2 + Solaris build environment, thanks to a report from David Mathog.

Bugs/Problems in (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.10.0:

• If the last line in your configuration file ends without a 'line feed' (ASCII 10 character), that whole line will be silently ignored!

  Thanks to Thomas Zastrow for pointing out this problem.

• The use of the '-J' (capital) option to display both the Julian date (day of year) and the number of remaining days in the year is broken. This causes garbage text (PostScript commands) to appear in place of the number of days remaining in the year.

  Until a new release of PCAL comes out, the fix involves hand-editing the source code. In file 'writefil.c', lines 1278 and 1279 have the octal character definitions for the parentheses, '\050' and '\051'. Change these to '\\050' and '\\051' (in other words, make the single backslash a double backslash) and recompile PCAL.

  Note that the '-j' (lowercase) option, which displays just the Julian date (day of year) still works correctly.

• On the DOS build ('pcal.exe', whether self-building or using the pre-built one), there is a bug in the moon phase calculation routine which causes the major phases of the moon (new, 1Q, full, 3Q) to be erroneously detected on 2 adjacent days instead of on just the single day on which they actually occur.

  This causes 2 of the same moon phase icons to appear on adjacent days on monthly-format calendars when the '-m' option is used.

  Note: This bug only affects the pure DOS build (i.e. made with 'Makefile.DOS'). It does not affect the Linux/Unix builds or the DJGPP-based or Cygwin-based builds.

• The example Polish events calendar ('calendar_pl.txt') provided by Dominik 'Chiron' Derlatka was inadvertently left out of this release. Until the next release, you can grab it by browsing the CVS repository.

Notes on (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.9.1:

Changes that were available in those releases:

• Support for deletion of specific instances of a general calendar event, thanks to a patch from Bill Bogstad.
• Support for several new character encodings (various ISO 8859-* encodings and KOI8-R)
• Improvements to the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) image capability to minimize changes required to the EPS file in order to work with PCAL, thanks to tips from Russell Steicke.
• Improved support for existing languages: Russian, Latvian, and Lithuanian
• Support for some new languages: Czech (by Peter Cernoch), Hungarian (by Ferenc Kruzslicz), Catalan (by Carles Sadurní Anguita)
• New Perl script (thanks to David Mathog) for generating calendars via HTML/CGI
• Additional sample calendar event files (e.g. US calendar from J. Rhett Hooper)
• Additional sample character encoding/font test files
• Various bug fixes

Bugs/Problems in (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.9.1:

• A couple of long-standing bugs were recently uncovered in the use of the timezone ('-z') option, which is used in the 'moon phase' calculations:
  1. Negative timezone arguments, used for areas east of (i.e. later than) UTC/Greenwich, were not being processed correctly. (They were erroneously adjusted by adding a full 24 hours to make them positive.) Thanks to Lalit Chhabra for reporting this bug.
  2. The user-specified timezone offset was being normalized to +/- 12 hours. Although this works for the vast majority of users, there are places in the world which are outside that range. For example, Christmas Island (aka 'Kiritimati', in the Pacific Ocean) is in the UTC+14 timezone. The local time there is 14 hours ahead of UTC, so the PCAL option would be '-z-14'. Obviously, with such places in the world, we can no longer normalize the user-specified timezone offset to +/- 12 hours.
• A compilation problem occurs under certain Cygwin environments due to a namespace collision of the 'getline()' routine in PCAL versus the generic library routine. Thanks to 'Dani' (Daniela Duerbeck) for reporting this.

  
  A temporary work-around to this problem simply involves renaming the 'getline()' routine to 'get_pcal_line()' (and adjusting the calls to it, obviously) followed by a recompile.

• A 'segmentation fault' crash can occur when a single entry in the PCAL configuration file has more than 100 'words' defining an event. Thanks to Eric Herrera for the crash report.

  
  Anyone encountering this (rare) problem before the next release of PCAL can edit the file 'src/pcaldefs.h', change the constant 'MAXWORD' (at line 602) from 100 to (e.g.) 300, and recompile.

Bugs/Problems in (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.9.0:

• The 'Makefile' file (which supports Unix/Linux, OS/2, and DOS+DJGPP building) has bad syntax which can cause an error like this: ``syntax error: unexpected end of file''. This is only encountered if you perform the 'make install' step.

  
  This bug is fixed in the 4.9.1 release. However, you can simply add a trailing semicolon and a backslash (" ; \ ") to lines 341 and 342 in the 'Makefile' file to circumvent the problem.

Notes on (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.8.0:

Changes that were available in that release:

• Ability to embed (slightly-modified) Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) images (e.g. photos, icons) in monthly-format PostScript calendars (see below for example monthly calendar)
• Support for several new languages: Swedish, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Estonian, Russian (experimental), Latvian (experimental), and Lithuanian (experimental)
• New paper sizes: 'legal' (8.5 x 14.0 inches) and 'tabloid' (11.0 x 17.0 inches)
• Ability to specify paper size at runtime (instead of at compile time)
• Enhanced abilities for 'pre-processor'-like directives ('define symbol_name')
• Improved HTML user interface for generating calendars via CGI
• Addition of pre-defined "Friday the 13th" events
• Ability to properly specify events in the native language
• Ability to build in DOS+DJGPP environment
• Additional sample calendar event files
• Various bug fixes
• Enhanced documentation ('man' page, etc)

Bugs/Problems in (now-obsolete) PCAL 4.8.0:

• Lines of the following format, which worked in earlier versions of PCAL, cause an ``unrecognized line'' error in v4.8.0:
  all Fridays in March xxxx

  
  Essentially, the plural of the name of a day of the week is no longer being properly recognized.

  Until this bug is fixed in a new release, please use the simple `work-around' of changing the plural to the singular (e.g. change `Fridays' to `Friday' [or just `Fri'] in the given example). (Thanks to Pedro Sanchez for reporting this bug.)

• The values used for the run-time options `-X' and/or `-Y' (used to alter the position of the calendar on the page) need to be changed, due to an inadvertently undocumented change in the meaning of these parameters. In earlier versions of PCAL, these parameters were used in an `absolute' sense, although there were design problems related to their use in `portrait' orientations (as opposed to `landscape' orientations). Beginning with version 4.8.0, these parameters instead act as a `bias' to the default position of the calendar. (Thanks to Pedro Sanchez for reporting the problem related to this undocumented change.)