MARC Report 256: Program changes

When the program is closed, MARC Report will now–periodically (ie every few days)–clean up files in its “Temp” folder. Depending on the number of files present there, this may take an extra second or two. A note to that effect (“Cleaning up temp files”) will appear in the status bar if/when this occurs. This cleanup is separate from the option to Cleanup Edit session work files (which you can control using the same-named option on the Edit Session page of the options).

Some users noted that when scraping text from a web page and pasting it into MARC Report, character encoding errors would be reported. MARC21 supports two encodings: MARC-8 and UTF-8. In Windows, data copied to the clipboard will sometimes use another encoding (Windows-1252, UTF-16, etc.). When the copied data is pasted into MARC, its going to create errors in any software that pays attention to the encoding expected in the MARC record (regardless of the leader 09 value). To try to ameliorate this problem, we have added an option named Re-encode clipboard pastes to the Record display page of the options. To learn more about how this works (and how it does not), visit the Help page for the Record display options.

We made a small change to the “codelist.txt” file that is distributed with each version of MARC Report. The format is unchanged, and the change should not affect any user versions of this file. The change in question removes all codes and captions that have never been used in MARC21¹⁾. In any case, although the program ignored these items when the codelist was loaded, their presence did make it harder to troubleshoot problems–hence the removal.

This version adds the ability to save and retrieve the options used in the MARC Sort/Dedupe utility. (In addition to MARC Sort, the same capability exists in MARC Analysis, MARC Review, MARC Global, Import text, and Verify.)

Not a program change per se, but we want to note that we have upgraded our server to support SSL (non-SSL links still work–unless some other mechanism on your computer is blocking them). Coincident with the change to the server, we have replaced the third-party component the program uses to connect to the internet with one that also supports SSL.²⁾