Release 1.3.1 on GitHub

[Hugh McGowan]

Hi all,

Release 1.3.1 is now available on GitHub. This release had several
contributions from the community, which is really fantastic.

I've relied pretty heavily on the unit tests to make sure we haven't
regressed and while they've been a tremendous help it's possible that
something still slipped through. Let me know and I'll try to fix them
as soon as I can. If you can provide an example (or better yet a
fix :) that would be terrific.

Thanks!
Hugh


INSTALLATION

The first command adds GitHub as an additional place to check for gems
so run that command if you haven't before. Then you can install the
GitHub version of the roo gem

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com/
gem install hmcgowan-roo

It should work like the standard Roo gem and scripts that used to use
the rubyforge gem (roo 1.2.3) will start using the new release.

FEATURES & FIXES

1. Performance improvement for OpenOffice/Excelx
These files used to be parsed by REXML and are now parsed with libxml-
ruby. The performance gain is pretty significant (5x on the unit tests
and the libxml-ruby site has a pretty detailed comparison if you're
interested)

2. Font Style Support
You can now test cells to see if they're bold, italic or underlined.
Unfortunately Google Spreadsheets doesn't support this in the API yet
but the other formats include this feature

3. Replaced parseexcel with ruby-spreadsheet
The parseexcel library is no longer under active development so it was
replaced with ruby-spreadsheet. This was necessary for font support
and should help with future development.

4. OpenOffice Special Characters
OpenOffice cells with non alphanumeric characters were not being
decoded properly. (e.g. > was not being translated to >)

5. Boolean values
Spreadsheet cells that were true or false were either not being read
at all or interpreted strings of garbage characters.

5. CharGuess
If CharGuess is installed, Roo will use it automatically instead of
requireing you to change the source.

6. Fix Cells with paragraphs
Roo was only pulling the last paragraph from a cell so now we'll get
the entier cell contents

DOCUMENTATION

You can get more information on the new features and syntax here:

http://wiki.github.com/hmcgowan/roo/releases

This is the homepage for Roo on GitHub:

http://github.com/hmcgowan/roo/tree/master

CONTRIBUTIONS

Thanks to everyone who contributed, especially the large amount of
work from Chase Gray on the upgrade to libxml-ruby.

If you'd like to contribute get a free GitHub account, fork the Roo
codeline and send a pull request with your changes. Don't forget to
add a unit test! GitHub is a fantastic collaborative environment and
makes contributing easy.

[Eugueny Kontsevoy]

This is fantastic.

I am still a bit confused about "semi-official" status of github-
hosted fork of roo.
Will this version appear on rubyforge?

Thank you.
--
Eugueny

[Hugh McGowan]

I've been unable to contact the developer (hopefully he's all right and just busy with other things). I'm trying one more time and if I'm unable to get a response I'll start the process to see if we can get the release on RubyForge too.

Thanks!
Hugh