Worksheet Crafter 2016.3 is available

I am happy to announce that the new Worksheet Crafter 2016.3 is now available. This new version comes with many new features requests by our customers, such as:

• A fraction pie for introducing fractions to your students
• New shapes for bows and curved arrows
• A very useful extension to the tag based clipart search
• Creative background patterns for shapes
• Special handwriting line font
• New Grundschrift font with dotted and arrow styles
• Support for automatic highlighting of all vowels in your text
• Support for number house exercises with 1 or 2 levels
• Significant Improvements to size consumption and quality of pictures
• Any many improvements more...

All these new features are available both for the Mac and the Windows version.

The Fraction Pie

The new Worksheet Crafter comes with a Fraction Pie shape, which is ideal for introducing fractions to your students. The fraction pie can visualize an arbitrary number of segments and filled segments, allowing you to realize any kind of fraction. Both the color and the background pattern are freely configurable:

You will find the new fraction pie in the left toolbar, inside the "Shapes" section.

New shapes for bows and curved arrows

With the Curved Line and the Curved Arrow shapes you will now find two new shapes in Worksheet Crafter which can be used for many purposes. The curved arrow is ideal for labeling images, connecting images with text and for visualizing jumps inside number ray activities:

The curved line is useful for connections of any kind and can additionally be used to manually design syllable bows:

Both color and line thickness are adjustable. You will find these two new shapes in the left toolbar, inside the "Shapes" section.

A very useful extension to the tag based clipart search

To make searching for suitable pictures even simpler, we introduced a new tag list for pictures. Once a picture gets selected in the clip art browser, Worksheet Crafter now shows you a list of tags which are associated with this picture. Simply click on such a tag to search for all related pictures:

Creative background patterns for shapes

All Shapes can now optionally use a background pattern instead of a single colored background. We provide 49 professionally designed textures for this purpose:

You can configure the background of your shape directly in the property editor. Simply set the Fill Style to Pattern and choose the appropriate texture with the Texture property.

Special handwriting line font

The new version comes with a font which is explicitly designed for being used in handwriting lines. The new font "WsC Lineaturschrift" comes very close to the 1:1:1 line ratio and thus works very well inside handwriting lines. You can find this new font in the font dropdown.

New Grundschrift font with dotted and arrow styles

Worksheet Crafter now includes a new Grundschrift font, explicitly created and optimized for our application. We ship this font in four variations, including outline, dotted and arrow styles. You will find the font called "WsC Grundschrift" in the font dropdown:

Automatic highlighting of vowels

You can now highlight all vowels in your text with a single click. These vowels then get rendered with an additional dot underneath. This feature can be used both for your own texts and for the ones included in Worksheet Crafter. Activating the vowel highlighting is really simple. Both the text box and the handwriting lines provide a new property called "Highlight Vowels". Simply check this property to enabled the highlighting.

Support for number house exercises with 1 or 2 levels

The exercise generator of the number house activity is now even more flexible. It now also supports houses with just one or two levels, which is great of students which have difficulties with math.

Significant Improvements to size consumption and quality of pictures

In the last months we spent a noticeable amount of time on improving Worksheet Crafter internals. Previously worksheets with many  pictures could causes issues since the pictures might not fit into memory anymore.

With the new version we applied several optimizations to this. The pictures in our worksheets now just need about 1/3 of the memory they needed before, without loosing any quality. Additionally we made sure that Worksheet Crafter has access to more memory in general. The combination of these two improvements means that you can now create worksheets larger than ever before.

At the same time we worked on improving the quality of printed pictures and managed to improve this significantly as well. Especially large images now get printed in a much higher quality.

And many impovements more…

In addition to the improvements mentioned above we have also fulfilled many more smaller wishes our customers asked us for, such as:

• The grid size in math grid and written methods item can now be adjusted via the "increase font size" and "decrease font size" buttons in the upper toolbar.
• If your school purchases Worksheet Crafter then you can now easily switch your license to the school license, using the new "Change License Data" option in the Help menu.
• In total we applied more than 20 additional improvements and fixes to this version, to make Worksheet Crafter even better.

How do I get the New Version?

If you already own the Basic or Premium Edition then you will get the new version for free, as part of your annual license. If you own the Unlimited Edition then you may purchase the new version for a reduced price. In any case you should receive an email with more information from us in the next few hours. If you don’t get this email then please contact us.

I hope that you like the new version! I am looking forward to your comments.

Greetings,
Fabian