Flipa – PDF Flipbook for WordPress (RTL & 20 Languages)

Changelog:

= 0.19.5 =
- Fixed: in a browser with anti-fingerprinting protection switched on, every page of the book came out as colored stripes instead of the document. Each page image is made by drawing the page onto a canvas and then reading it back, and that protection replaces what comes back rather than refusing it, so nothing reported an error and the whole book was unreadable. LibreWolf turns this protection on by default, which is why it showed up there and not in Firefox. The reader now checks that a canvas gives back what was drawn on it, before the first page is rendered. When it does not, the book is replaced by a short explanation of what the browser is doing and what to change, rather than a few hundred pages of noise. The check reads four pixels and runs once.

= 0.19.4 =
- Fixed: a chapter or bookmark name written in anything beyond plain English was damaged when the book was saved. Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and even a French accent came back as a run of letters and numbers. Worse, a chapter or bookmark name containing a double quote emptied the ENTIRE table of contents on save, with nothing shown to say so. Both had one cause: the names were stored in a form that WordPress then took apart. Names damaged by this are repaired for you the first time you open the WordPress admin after updating, and the untouched original is kept alongside so nothing is thrown away. A table that was emptied cannot be brought back, because the names are no longer in the database in any form; if that happened to one of your books you will need to enter it again, and we are sorry. Also fixed: a password containing a backslash was stored without it, so the person who set the password could not open their own book. This has been present since the table of contents was introduced, and it is why right-to-left chapter names never stuck. If you gave up on a Hebrew or Arabic contents list, it works now.

= 0.19.3 =
- Fixed: long books took far too long to become readable and kept the browser busy the whole time. The reader used to draw and compress every page in the book before it considered itself finished, however long the book was, so a few hundred scanned pages could mean minutes of a pegged processor and a loading spinner that would not go away, and on a phone it might never finish at all. It now prepares the pages around you and keeps up as you move, so a long book opens in about the time a short one always did. Searching still covers the whole book, not only the part that has been drawn. Fixed: choosing a preset page-turn sound did not stick if the book also had a sound file uploaded. The picker showed "My sound file" again on the next visit, and the choice was quietly overwritten the next time the book was saved. A preset and an uploaded file can now live together, and the picker shows what is actually stored. New: "Import from PDF" under Contents reads the chapter bookmarks a PDF already carries and fills the contents table in for you, instead of typing several hundred rows by hand. Many PDFs carry none, and merging several files into one often replaces them with the file names, so it is worth checking your file in a PDF reader first. Changed: the Free versus Pro comparison in the editor was missing four features Pro has had since 0.18.2, and now lists resume reading, a chosen opening page, links to a specific page, and keeping the page number out of the address bar.

= 0.19.2 =

- Fix: if you also have the free Flipa from WordPress.org installed on the same site, this edition could refuse to switch on. Pressing Activate did nothing visible, no error appeared, and the plugin simply stayed off. That is fixed, and the two can now sit side by side. Fix: a large part of the settings screens could not be translated into any language, because those labels had never been included in the plugin's translation template. Everything on the Book, Background, Contents, Display, Extras, Embed and Help tabs can now be translated, and the template is generated from the code on every release so it cannot fall behind again. New: the settings screens now ship translations for 19 languages instead of one, so the WordPress admin appears in your language without any setup. The reader your visitors see has had all 20 languages since the start; this release is about the admin. Nothing already translated was lost or reset.

= 0.19.1 =

Fixes a flipbook rendering as an empty reader, showing no pages and no error, on a site that answers at more than one address.

If your site is reachable at both example.com and www.example.com, and the PDF was saved under one form while a visitor arrived on the other, the reader treated its own file as coming from somewhere else and refused it. The file is now served from whichever of your own addresses the visitor is actually using.

This also covers WordPress installed in a subdirectory, and a multilingual site that gives each language its own domain. Sites that put each language in a folder, such as /en/ and /es/, were never affected: a folder is not a separate address.

Nothing about which files the reader will accept has changed. It still only opens a PDF from your own site, and a web address you pasted from somewhere else is left exactly as you entered it.

= 0.19.0 =

Scroll reading mode: on a long book, a page you had already read crisply could quietly drop back to the low-resolution version. Pages are now kept by how recently you looked at them, and a page that does get released is rebuilt from the PDF rather than left blurred.

Hovering near the outer corner of the cover or the back page no longer lifts a blank sheet that is not really there. Dragging that corner was always correct and is unchanged.

Switching the interface language now re-translates the labels inside the More tray and the Zoom menu. They previously stayed in whatever language the book first opened with, both in the editor preview and for a visitor changing the language in the reader itself.

In the editor, the live preview now shows the background you actually chose instead of a fixed dark one, with a checkerboard when you pick Transparent. A width or height the plugin cannot read is now reported, with what was used instead, rather than silently replaced by the default.

New: the shortcode can open a book on a chosen page, resume where each visitor stopped, or keep the page number out of the address, for one placement at a time. So the same book can open at its index on one page and at the order form on another.

Housekeeping: the PDF endpoint now redirects through WordPress's own safe-redirect helper while still allowing a book whose file lives on another domain. The plugin ships a THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt listing the bundled libraries with links to their sources.

= 0.18.6 =
- Fix: a regression in 0.18.5. If you placed a flipbook with a hand-written iframe rather than with the shortcode or the block, the book stopped appearing and an upload box showed in its place. That is fixed, and those embeds work again with nothing to change at your end. If you saw an upload prompt where your book should be, updating is all that is required, and apologies for the disruption. Security: the protection added in 0.18.5 is unchanged in effect. The reader will still only open a PDF that lives on your own site, so nobody can build a link that displays a document of their choosing inside your address bar. 0.18.5 enforced that by refusing the older address format outright, which was stricter than it needed to be and broke working pages; 0.18.6 accepts the older format again and checks where the file actually comes from instead.

= 0.18.5 =
- Security: the reader would load any PDF address handed to it in its own web address. Because the reader file is public, anyone could build a link that displayed a document of their choosing inside your site's address bar, which is useful for phishing. The reader no longer accepts an address at all: WordPress passes it a reference to the flipbook, and WordPress decides which file that reader is allowed to have, applying the same permission rules as the 0.18.4 fix. Reported by an external researcher. Change: the PDF's own address is no longer written into the page. Please note this does not make the file private, and is not meant to: the file stays in your Media Library and anyone who has its address can still open it, exactly as before. Compatibility: nothing to change. Existing flipbooks, shortcodes and blocks keep working untouched, and the download button still names the file properly.

= 0.18.4 =

- Security: a flipbook that was still a draft, pending or private would render for anyone if its shortcode was placed on a page, and with it that book's PDF. The reader now checks that the viewer is allowed to see that flipbook, using WordPress's own rules, so authors still preview their own drafts and editors still see private books. Reported by an external researcher. Fix: long books looked soft or blocky while you were simply reading them. The reader keeps a light-weight image of every page so a book of any length stays within memory, and re-renders the page you are looking at from the PDF at full sharpness; that sharp re-render only ran when you zoomed or switched to single-page view, so a resting two-page spread showed the light-weight image. It now runs at rest as well, and the longer the book the bigger the difference. Fix: a dark band along the bottom edge of every page, visible on the covers, on every page in scroll mode and during a page turn. Fix: on the first spread after the front cover and the last before the back cover, the page shadow and the page-stack depth vanished during a page turn and came back when it settled. Fix: the loading indicator floated in the middle of the browser window instead of sitting on the reader, and the toolbar started at the top of the frame and jumped to the bottom once the book appeared.

= 0.18.3 =

- Wording only; no flipbook behaves any differently. The per-book "Address bar" setting under Extras used to read "Do not show the page number in the address bar", which left it unclear whether unticking it would stop links to a page working. It now reads "Keep the page number out of the address bar", and the hint says plainly that ticking it does both things at once: the address stays clean, and links to a specific page stop working for that book.

= 0.18.2 =
- New: the reader can remember where each visitor stopped and reopen the book on
that page. Nothing is uploaded; the position is kept in the visitor's own browser.
Turn it on per book under Extras.
- New: choose which page a book opens on. Useful when the first page is a cover you
would rather skip, or when a book is really a chapter of something longer. Set it
under Extras; leave it empty to open on page one.
- New: link straight to a page. The address bar follows the page being read even when
the book is embedded in your own page, so a visitor can copy the address and send
someone to exactly that page, and Share hands out a link to the page on screen rather
than the book's first page.
- New: you can switch the page number in the address bar off for a book, under Extras.
With it off the book neither writes the page to the address nor accepts a link to one.
- A link to a specific page always wins over a remembered position and over the opening
page, so a link you send someone opens where you meant it to.
- With more than one book on a page, the one you are reading is the one that controls
the address bar, so a book playing by itself elsewhere on the page cannot take it over.

= 0.18.1 =
- Fix: the loading indicator did not appear at all in the default embed mode.
The reader showed the toolbar and nothing else while a PDF loaded, because
the loading panel had no height to sit in until the book had already been
measured. It now shows in every embed mode, so a large PDF no longer looks
like nothing is happening.

= 0.18.0 =
- Fix: the Download PDF button is now built the same way as every other optional control.
It is off unless a book turns it on, instead of being switched on by the reader and then
suppressed. This corrects a coding fault, not a change to what Free and Pro include.
- Fix: the toolbar no longer draws a background strip behind it. It sits directly on your
background, or straight on your page when Transparent is on, instead of the full-width
band it used to paint.
- Fix: the small flipa mark in the reader corner now follows the chosen light or dark theme
instead of always using the dark version.
- Fix: the book's drop shadow was clipped by the edge of the reader at some sizes, most
visibly along the bottom. The shadow has been made lighter and the reader now reserves
room for it, so it stays complete in narrow containers as well as wide ones.
- Fix: the current page number box is now half transparent, in both the light and the dark
reader theme, so your background color shows through it like the rest of the toolbar.
- Fix: the left and right arrow keys now work as soon as the pointer is over the book.
Previously, in a page that embeds the reader, you had to click the book first.

= 0.17.1 =
- Fixes for the custom page-turn sound added in 0.17.0. Using your own sound is now
an explicit choice in the sound list; before, a saved file quietly overrode whichever
built-in sound was selected, so the editor and the reader disagreed about what would play.
Your sound no longer arrives late: recorded files often begin with a moment of silence, and
Flipa now skips straight to the sound so it lands with the page turn. A single page turn can
no longer play the flip sound twice. A quiet file is raised to a usable level and a loud one
is kept in check. The editor also checks the file you choose and tells you what it found,
including leading silence and files longer than a page turn.

= 0.17.0 =

- New: the reader now shows a real progress bar with a percentage while the PDF
downloads, instead of a spinner that gave no sense of how much was left. A large book on a
slow connection no longer looks like it has frozen. New: use your own page-turn sound. Pick
any audio file from the Media Library and it replaces the built-in ones; if that file will
not play, the reader quietly falls back to a built-in sound, so a bad upload can never stop
the book turning. Fix: the block editor's bundled translations were never loaded, so the
block's own labels stayed in English even on a translated site. Housekeeping: US spelling
used consistently across the reader.

= 0.16.3 =
- Fix: the block editor's own labels and settings carried the wrong text domain, so none of them could be translated. They now translate correctly in every language. Housekeeping: punctuation tidied to plain hyphens across the reader and the editor in all 20 interface languages. Reader behaviour is unchanged.

= 0.16.2 =
- Fixed a 0.16.1 regression: with the default Dark reader theme on a light background colour, the toolbar icons were drawn white-on-white and disappeared. The toolbar now always auto-contrasts against a solid background, whichever theme is chosen. Side panels and popups still follow the chosen theme.

= 0.16.1 =
* Editor live preview overhaul: settings changes now update the running preview instantly. The PDF is only re-rendered when you change the PDF itself or media hotspots. Chapters, bookmarks, display toggles, theme, colours, reading direction, page view, language, vertical scroll and 3D tilt all apply live.
* Vertical scroll smoothness: page rendering no longer competes with your scrolling, sharp re-renders wait until scrolling pauses, and pages streaming in can no longer nudge the layout.
* Reader theme (Dark/Light) now themes the whole reader: toolbar, menus and popups. Your chosen background colour is always respected; the two settings are independent.
* Fixed: the "Powered by flipa" credit could not be hidden once shown. It now follows the setting exactly and sits at the reading-start corner (left in LTR, right in RTL), opposite the page-load counter.
* Fixed: side arrows showed even when disabled; they are now off by default.
* Fixed: "Hide the first / last (jump) arrows" had no effect in the live preview.
* Fixed: the single-page view showed a baked-in edge shadow at rest.
* Fixed: the zoom and More popups were misplaced in right-to-left books.
* Fixed: the zoom controls were invisible in the Light theme popup.
* The "More" toolbar button now hides itself when it has nothing to show.
* Jump to page off now shows the page number as plain text instead of a disabled input.
* Bundled a full Hebrew translation of the editor.

= 0.16.0= 
- Download PDF, Print, and Autoplay are now Pro features.
- Refreshed the plugin logo in the editor.
- Display settings labels are now translatable.
- Corrected the Free vs Pro help text (in-book search, bookmarks, vertical scroll and 3D tilt are Pro).
- The editor live preview now updates immediately when you change the background colour.

= 0.15.1=
- The plugin icon now shows correctly on the connect, account and plugins screens (it was falling back to a generic placeholder on some installs).
- Tidied the zoom menu: removed the redundant Fit page option, leaving Automatic Zoom and Actual size.

= 0.15.0 =
* Much sharper reader: pages now render at full device resolution, so text and images stay crisp on high-resolution and Retina screens, both at rest and while flipping.
* Big books: long PDFs (hundreds of pages) now open reliably without the reader running out of memory.
* Sharper zoom: zooming in re-renders the page from the PDF at high resolution, so zoomed-in text stays clear.
* Crisper scroll view: pages sharpen as they scroll into view.
* Fixed clickable PDF links that could turn the page instead of opening the link in single-page view.
* New setting: hide the first / last (jump) side arrows, keeping only the previous / next arrows.

=0.14.1 =
"The reader now adapts to the page background: on a light background the corner logo, side arrows and actions menus switch to a matching light style (they stay dark on dark backgrounds)."

=0.14.0 =
"New reader design: a cleaner dark toolbar, a labelled actions menu (icons with text), and minimalist side arrows (previous/next plus jump to start and end) with the book neatly inset.
New zoom menu: Fit plus a live percentage with zoom out and in.
A small flipa mark now sits in the reader corner (Pro users can hide it).
3D tilt now leans only the book, not the surrounding controls.
Shared and embedded flipbooks now carry the full actions menu (search, autoplay, print, 3D tilt, page depth and QR).
The new reader labels are translated across all 20 languages."

=0.13.1 =
"Maintenance release — PHP compatibility and dependency updates. No feature changes."

= 0.13.0 =
* New: In-book text search (Pro). A search box in the reader finds any word across the whole PDF, lists the matching pages with a snippet, jumps straight to a result, and highlights every match on the page. Works in page-flip and vertical-scroll reading modes.
* Fix: single-page (single-spread) view no longer over-sizes the page in embedded flipbooks; a lone page now matches one page of the two-page spread.

= 0.12.1 =
* Security: stricter validation of the flipbook width/height values to prevent CSS injection via shortcode attributes.
* Change: the "Powered by flipa" viewer credit is now off by default and shown only when you opt in (Background tab).
* Improvement: unified text domain for more reliable translation loading.
* Branding: refreshed plugin icon and logo.