Release Notes for Quasar 1.4.3:
-------------------------------

Quasar 1.4.3 is released as a follow up to the last public release of
version 1.4.1 (version 1.4.2 was used internally but had some problems
so it was never publicly released).  With the new version we have
concentrated on increased I18N support and ease of installation as well
as some new features and some bug fixes.  Here is a summary of what has
been done since 1.4.1:


1. Complete I18N Support:

Quasar has been switched to use the ICU library from IBM which provides
date, time, number, percent, and currency formatting and parsing for
pretty much all the locales in the world.  This replaces the existing
code we had developed which was planned to provide this level of
abilities but wasn't there yet.  This is a significant change in how
Quasar deals with data so any feedback on problems (or kudos!) would
be appreciated.

Along with the switch to ICU, each database driver has been reviewed in
relationship to I18N character sets and collation sequences and Quasar
can now take advantage of the abilities of each database type supported.
We've tested Quasar on Sybase and PostgreSQL for storage of Norwegian,
Japanese, Inuktitut, French, and English text and feel that it should be
possible to support almost any character set in the world.  The emphasis
is on using Unicode where possible which works well with Sybase and
PostgreSQL but the Firebird database is lacking in this area and has
limited support for collations and code sets.


2. Database Driver Re-Write:

The database driver architecture of Quasar has been re-written as a general
cleanup, for enhanced I18N support, and also to make it easier to install
Quasar.  The configuration of the drivers is easier now and each driver
has a Test button in the configuration screen which will try to verify
all the configuration data and give warnings or errors indicating problems
with the configuration.

Another large change has been to make it so that the actual database
connection is done on the server side rather than by the client.  This
means the client doesn't need to have any part of the database installed
and when you want to update the database version, you can do so just on
the server.  It also means the Windows client will work with PostgreSQL
which was hard to get to work in the past (though its easier now with
PostgreSQL version 8.0).  This change should make installation and setup
easier on the clients since all that is needed there is the "quasar" client
program and the localized help files.

The PostgreSQL driver in Quasar 1.4.3 also now supports versions of
PostgreSQL earlier than 7.4 so it should handle most or all of the
versions of PostgreSQL that ship with recent Linux distributions.


3. Reports:

Some new features have been added to the report generator.  You can now
specify to start a new page before or after a report band so this allows
you to have a report where each group starts on a new page.  The image
handling is also easier now with automatic smooth scaling of the image so
you just need to specify the image filename (or the data) and a place and
size and Quasar does the rest.

Some new reports have also been added to Quasar.  The physical inventory
section has been switched over to using the report generator rather than
the old reporting system which allows you to modify the reports if you
want.

Some reports have also been fixed.  The balance sheet and profit and loss
now handle the case where only some of your accounts have numbers.  Some
inventory reports that were ignoring the stocked flags were also fixed
and reports that were not including all the selection criteria in the
title have had that added.

The multi-column features of the report generator has been removed since
it was not used in any Quasar reports and it was incomplete.  It will be
evaluated over time to see if something needs to be added back for this
(especially in future when shelf label printing is moved to the new
report generator) but for now its out.


4. New Features:

Quasar can now round prices for you automatically.  You specify the rules
for rounding prices (for example if the price ends in "3" add .02 to it)
and when Quasar calculates a price for you (either in the item master
screen or in the price batch), it will be rounded according to your
rules.

The phone and fax number fields in Quasar are wider now to allow for the
long numbers used in some countries and we've added a second phone number
to keep track of a cell phone number.

Quasar will also now handle A4 paper sizes better.  Even though the
report definitions in Quasar are Letter sized, the reporting engine will
now adjust things to fit A4 sized paper if thats what you choose and
Quasar will also keep track of this preference for using A4 paper and
it will be the default on future print dialogs.


5. Bug Fixes:

We've found and fixed the problem with compiling Quasar using gcc 3.4 so
we can now release Quasar packages for Fedora Core 3 and Mandrake 10.1.
We also increased the password field size so that the same size if used
throughout Quasar.  The backup/restore has been fixed to use UTF-8 for
character encoding so non-ascii data is no longer lost and we fixed a
problem in the Point-of-Sale when calculating tax on large prices.  We
fixed some problems with account type customer invoices involving tax
included pricing.
