Release Notes for PyCIFRW-4.1  
=============================

Version 4.1 is the first stable release in the next major version of
PyCIFRW.  It includes support for CIF 2.0 (including unicode), dREL
and DDLm, with expanded documentation.  A number of major
simplifications have gone on under the hood leading to slightly faster
CIF file input and much simpler construction and interaction with loops.

Templates have been added for finer control over the layout of output
CIF files.

Incompatible changes (since 3.0 series)
=======================================

* Function "validate" has been renamed to Validate for consistency
* Nested loops (only allowed in STAR files) are no longer supported
* Merging of datablocks in 'overlay' mode has been removed. This is
  relevant only for dictionary merging.
* The package now installs in a separate Python site-packages directory. 
  called 'CifFile'. It should thus be imported using 'import CifFile' or 
  'from CifFile import CifFile'.  This may differ from earlier versions.
* A single-item loop can no longer be created using the form cf['_dataname'] = [1,2,3,4]
  To get the old behaviour, created the CifBlock with 'compat_mode = True'.
* The line folding protocol is always used when writing CIF files. This is
  only invoked if you have lines longer than 2048 characters/your specified
  maximum length.
* The text prefix protocol introduced in CIF2.0 is always used when writing. 
  This is only invoked if a string contains the character sequence '\n;'

Deprecated methods
==================

* AddCifItem.  This unnecessarily convoluted and mind-bending way of
adding a whole loop all at once in a single tuple has been deprecated.
Just assign dataname values using the usual square brackets and then
call CreateLoop with the datanames that belong in a single loop.


