Jochen Bartlau 
As we all are affected by the infamous COVID-19 outbreak I assume many of you are working from their home offices just as we do. We had the luck (aka foresight) to prepare this early on so we were up and running in less than a day. Nevertheless, once we started, there were a couple of challenges we were facing. I thought I'd share some nuggets here that might be useful to you.
Creating preview files is all well and good. However, when you needed to access the texts within the preview for post processing, you had to resort to a text export, finding the relevant strings and copying them from there. In LL25, we added a powerful way to extract texts from a preview, directly from within the preview window.
GraphQL was publicly released in 2015 and became quite popular since then. It's used by a number of big web applications like Instagram, Facebook and others.
While for standard tasks the default mechanism for Rscript rendering of List & Label might be sufficient and convenient to automatically generate the png, jpeg or svg chart output from a Rscript on the fly, there might be situations where you simply desire more control.
List & Label has supported a number of text based export formats for quite a while. You can have XML, CSV and layout TXT export in different variants. That way, you can use List & Label as a convenient way to convert your data from one of the supported data sources to something you can use in other applications again. But one very popular format was missing so far that's been around for quite a while: Java Script Object Notation aka JSON.
.NET Standard and .NET Core have been around for a while now. We jumped the bandwagon early and offered beta support since LL23 while officially supporting the new framework since List & Label 24. With the advent of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft announced that the .NET 4.x releases will be the last of their kind and .NET Core 3.0 – which will later simply be called .NET and will be named ".NET 5" in its next release – is the place to go. We're already there.
Continuing our quest to make the table object more versatile and powerful in LL25, we added an important tweak to the way table lines are kept together. Before, you just had the choice between keeping all lines together or none. That means, if the output for a single record stretched over a couple of pages and consisted of several line definitions, there was hardly ever a way to get the wrapping "right".
This has been another great suggestion from our community at Idea Place. While the mail module is quite flexible and can send mails via SMTP, MAPI and XMAPI, and can either use the client's mail dialog or a custom, built in dialog, there was no way to append Outlook standard signatures to the sent mails so far. Microsoft has finally declined the request to add this feature to Outlook's MAPI implementation. So there was room for improvement.
This is another of those "huh, you didn't have that before" features. As a WYSIWYG layout oriented reporting tool, the page has always been king for List & Label. While this is nice in many circumstances, when it comes to reporting for the web or XLS and printing is not planned at all, the result can be unwanted although looking beautiful.
Another step forward in our continuing quest to improve what's already great – our table object. Until LL25, you had to decide which widths you'd like to reserve for your respective columns. While this works out just nice most of the time, sometimes the result is less than perfect.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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