Happy 2017! I hope that everyone had a fine holiday season. I spent some time over the past couple weeks away from MarcEdit and doing a little bit of writing. This put my usual holiday update behind a bit (which I apologize about, since it included a couple bug fixes that folks were waiting for) — but it was nice to spend some time writing, building robots with my son, and otherwise taking it slow.
With that said, I have posted an Update for the Windows/Linux versions of MarcEdit and will be working to update the Mac version (with appropriate fixes and new stuff) later this week. I’m running slightly behind because of the above mentioned robot building. I coach/mentor a middle school robotics team, and their regional competition is this weekend, so it seems most of my free time is being spent with the kids working on their robot and research project.
Anyway — the Changelog:
- Update: Z39.50: When downloading records that are in UTF8, the tool will ensure that the LDR byte position related to character encoding is set if the system is supplying MARC21 or USMARC records
- Update: MARCEngine: When translating UTF8 conversions, the tool will always check the LDR position and set when appropriate (currently, this only happens when MarcEdit actually does a character conversion).
- Bug Fix: Print A Record Per Page — Some record data would be deleted if the last line on a page should have printed onto the next page.
- Bug Fix: Exporting Tab Delimited Records — the Secondary delimiter isn’t being placed correctly. This is a regression caused when adding the ability to protect context between subfields on export.
- Enhancement: MARCValidator — program will now do a quick record deduplication check and if found, will provide a message letting folks know that duplicate records are likely in the file.
- Enhancement: Console Program — added -dups? switch to allow a quick check to see if duplicate records are likely in a file.
- Enhancement: Console Program — added an -experimental switch to enable direct processing of tasks. This improves task processing from within the Console, but is still a little experimental. This is the best method to run task editing via Linux.
- Enhancement: About Windows — added the update code to the window. This is the code (not the build number) that is most important for me when debugging.
Two specific changes I want to highlight. One is the Console changes. I’ve added two new switches. The first affects running tasks via the console program. I’ve created an —experimental switch to move to a new way of processing tasks that is faster and more consistent on all platforms (Windows/Linux). This will eventually replace the old method, but for now, uses wanting to try the new method will need to use this flag to call it explicitly. So, for example:
>>%MARCEDIT_PATH\cmarcedit.exe —s “.\Desktop\myfile.mrc” —d “.\Desktop\processed.mrc” —task “.\Desktop\mytask.txt” —experimental
That would initiate the new process. Leaving off the —experimental switch would use the older method which simply shells the task to the main MarcEdit.exe application, though, run silently. Since I’m using the console program more and more when helping users setting up automated workflows on Linux, I needed to move this process into the cmarcedit.exe stack — which also improves the speed and reliability, a lot.
The second change deals with the validator. A question on the list this week was complicated because the source file had duplicates (when it shouldn’t have). So, in thinking about this — I added a process to the Validator’s normal validation process that will check for likely duplicates. When you run the validator now, if it encounters likely duplicates, you’ll see a note at the top of the log. For example:
This won’t tell you which records are duplicates, or how many, but it will let you know, up front, that the records likely contain duplicates. Likewise, you can get this same information from the commandline. Run the following:
>>%MARCEDIT_PATH%\cmarcedit.exe —s “.\Desktop\myfile.mrc” —dups?
And the tool will again, give you a message letting you know if duplicates are likely:
These are small changes, but I think changes that will make a significant difference for users working with data that comes from 3rd-party sources.
Downloads should be available via the automated updating functionality, or by getting the files directly from: http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads
-tr