Version 2.7.1: Toggle Black Screen and Bugfixes

Release Summary

This is just a minor follow up release from version 2.7.0. It adds a button to toggle the presentation to a black screen (and back), see pull request 45 for details. In addition, some bugfixes have been done.

What's Changed

• Toggle presentation to black screen and implement proper Right-To-Left detection in #45
• Bugfixes in #46
• Make fade transitions true by default in #47
• Make FormSongStyle poOwnerFormCenter in #49

Full Changelog: v2.7.0...v2.7.1

Version 2.7.0: Song specific style settings, transition effects and bug fixes

Release Summary

This release brings major feature updates and bugfixes. It is now possible to apply song specific style settings (just right click on a selected song and select "Edit Song Style..") and export/import them together with the songs as JSON. In addition to that, many bugs have been fixed concerning the stability of the program. Dark Mode for Windows is now available and transitions make the slide viewing more smoothly. You can also set up black screens between songs (when the slides are empty).

New Features

• Per-song style overrides: Each song in the selection can now have its own background image, background colour, text colour, font, transparency, and horizontal alignment — independent of the global presentation settings. A dedicated "Song Style" dialog is accessible via the right-click context menu on any song.
• Per-song PPTX masters: When exporting to PowerPoint, each song can use its own custom master slide.
• Fade transition between slides: A smooth cross-fade effect between slides can be enabled in the settings. The fade duration is configurable (default: 150 ms).
• Black screen on empty slide: A new setting causes Cantara to show a pure black screen instead of the background when an empty slide is displayed.
• JSON song selection export/import: Song selections can now be saved and loaded as .json files. The format bundles song content, per-song style overrides, and background images into a single portable file, enabling full round-trip export/import across machines.
• Windows dark mode: Cantara now follows the system dark mode setting on Windows.
• Windows installer: An Inno Setup installer is now available for Windows.
• Third-party libraries dialog: A new dialog lists all third-party libraries used by Cantara along with their licences.

Improvements

• Improved Flatpak permissions handling: Cantara now uses the XDG portal for file access in sandboxed environments and provides a standard open dialog for selecting background images.
• Improved text rendering with a custom word-wrap function for more accurate line breaking.
• Improved font rendering quality settings.
• Updated and extended translations.
• The main window title has been simplified to "Cantara".

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a crash (SIGSEGV) when starting a presentation after songs were added via "Select All" or drag-and-drop, or after using the search filter — the TRepoFile object reference was not attached to list entries in those code paths.
• Fixed the song editor not opening the correct song when invoked from the context menu (wrong file lookup and a form initialisation timing issue).
• Fixed background colour and transparency changes not being reflected in the song style preview dialog.
• Fixed background colour and transparency changes not being applied in the presentation window and image export when two songs share the same background image but use different colours.
• Fixed metadata parsing truncating field values that contained a colon character.
• Fixed a layout overlap of the background colour panel and an incorrect sign on the transparency value in the song style dialog.
• Fixed a type cast error in the PPTX custom master slide lookup.
• Fixed an exception when closing the application under certain conditions.
• Fixed .txt files not being recognised as valid song files.
• Fixed several text sizing and line-length calculation issues in the presentation canvas.
• Fixed a content-area layout bug affecting Cantara running as a Flatpak.

Cantara V. 2.6.1 beta: Bug fixes and dark mode for windows

• This is the beta version of a minor release consisting of a bug fix (thanks to @donin1129). It includes #27
• Dark mode for Windows has been implemented. If Windows is set to darkmode, Cantara will be likewise.

Please test the release and report any bugs or issues. Thank you!

Version 2.6.0

• Migrate to bgrabitmap for better handling and displaying of the presentation slides. In the future, further text effects like shadows etc. can be easily implemented.
• Redesign the multi screen presentation controller: In addition to the songs, every slide with content is listed and can be selected directly.
• Context menu of presentation window: Fullscreen and ending of presentation is now also selectable with that menu.
• Minor improvements of the song editor and full text search.
• Add "Select all Songs" under File menu in song selection.
• Bugfix: Wrong display of presentation when no specific font has been selected #24
• Bugfix: Drag and Drop exception in song selection window
• Bugfix: Wrong escaping of special characters in pptx-export
• A lot of minor bugfixes and corrections
• Translation update

Version 2.6.0 RC

Version 2.6.0 is the pre-release for the upcoming version 2.6.0. Although it is still considered to run stable, please use it with care and report bugs/issues.

Changes/Bugfixes since version 2.5.1.

• Migrate to bgrabitmap for better handling and displaying of the presentation slides. In the future, further text effects like shadows etc. can be easily implemented.
• Redesign the multi screen presentation controller: In addition to the songs, every slide with content is listed and can be selected directly.
• Context menu of presentation window: Fullscreen and ending of presentation is now also selectable with that menu.
• Minor improvements of the song editor and full text search
• Add "Select all Songs" under File menu in song selection.
• Bugfixes:
  • #24
  • Drag and Drop exception in song selection window
  • Wrong escaping of special characters in pptx-export

Version 2.5.0

Version 2.5.0

This version brings some major improvements as the function to export source code as pptx file. In addition, it comes with a large rewrite of code, bugfixes and much more...

Improvements/Bugfixes

• Complete rewriting of large parts of the source code including the internal structures for generating and painting presentation slides
• Improvement of the presentation layout
• Improvement of the song editor
• Implementation of a preview of the presentation in the settings menu
• Implementation of slide export to pptx (using PptxgenJs)
• Implementation of slide export to pictures
• Implementation of song lyrics export to markup text files
• Implementation of a full text search for browsing song lyrics
• Implementation of a two language song presentation
• Improvements of the presentation window and control (more keys and remote controls are supported)
• Fix issue #17
• Cantara can now be directly opened with a .songtex-file.

Version 2.4.1: Italian and Spanish translation

The version 2.4.1. adds Italian and Spanish translation to Cantara. Despite that, there is no additional functionality compared to Version 2.4.0 which means that if you are not using one of the languages, you don't necessarily need to update to this version.

Thank you to the translators!

• The Italian translation has been provided by @albanobattistella
• The Spanish translation has been provided by @haggen88

Thank you for the effort!

Version 2.4.0: Song Editor, Automatic Slide Pagebreak, Bugfixes

Version 2.4 is finally there! Beside new features, it also brings a lot of bug fixes. See the list below for details.

Improvements/Enhancements

• A new editor has been implemented which allows editing of the songs, converting CCLI songs into the song format, creating new songs, archiving them and cloning them (e.g. for different versions).
• A welcome assistant will guide new users after the first start of Cantara to setup and understand the program.
• Cantara can automatically break long slides into two pages if configured in the settings.
• The newly implemented SongTeX file format allows to export songs slides with the song lyrics and the order.

Bug Fixes

• Floating point errors when no background picture was selected
• Loading the slides took a long time if a background was selected

Version 2.4.0 beta: Song Editor, Welcome Dialog, Bug Fixes

Version 2.4.0 brings some major enhancements and bug fixes. Please note that the current state is still Beta. While it should work stable for most of the time, errors and bugs might occur. Feel free to report them as an issue.

Enhancements:

• Editor for creating, editing, archivating, cloning and converting song files inside Cantara
• Song selections can be exported with the songlyrics within and also imported into Cantara. For that, a new file format (SongTeX) has been implemented. The imported songs will be automatically added to the repository if necessary. This solves issue #7.
• A setup assistent will help with the basic configuration of Cantara when started for the first time.

Bug Fixes:

• Loading a presentation with background image took a long time, this is solved now.

Testing
Please feel free to test this release. Windows users can download the exe-file and install the program. For Linux users, snap is recommended:

snap install --beta cantara

If you use Pacman as your package manager (Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc.), you can also use the prebuilt cantara-2.4.0beta-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst:

wget https://github.com/reckel-jm/cantara/releases/download/v2.4.0beta/cantara-2.4.0beta-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
sudo pacman -U cantara-2.4.0beta-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Version 2.3.2: traditional Chinese translation, Flatpak generation support

Version 2.3.2. brings two minor but very useful improvements:

• Thanks to @primores-resugendi, a translation for traditional Chinese has been added.
• Thanks to @freundTech, the repository and program is now ready to be published as a flatpak.