Cantara Files

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.