Below I comment on some of the technical details following the original posting of how to get the programs to read HK News Chinese edition. Symbols like $, ftp>, [] are computer prompts, plain text is what you should type on your terminal. The best way to serve those who do not have the technical background is to mail them the files with PC or Mac disks. I would have volunteered if I were not going to take a vacation in a couple weeks. The font file is too big for me to download it the usual way. I've not tested the whole thing yet. Just be aware what I write may contain mistakes. What you really need are files "untarmail" and "atob" on your mainframe, and "shownews.exe" and "readnews.exe" on your PC. When you get the news from the mail you do mail> save message hkfilesaved and then $ untarmail khfilesaved hknewsfile then use Kermit, a communication software, to download the file "hknewsfile" to your PC (or Mac). Then on your PC C:\> readnews hknewsfile to read or C:\> shownews hknewsfile to print it to a PosScript printer (probably there is a middle step here.) My impression so far is the whole procedure is too complicated for regular users. By the time you get everything right the next day newspare arrives. But this is the first large scale experiment to transmit Chinese files via network. Success or fail all provide valuable results. --------------------------------------- Technical detail: ================= Encoding format: The artciles contain Chinese characters encoded in the BIG5 format. They are then converted to ASCII using `btoa' (binary to ascii) and then sent out through email. When you receive the mails, you should run them through `atob' (ascii to binary) and then display them using one of the programs described below. The program `atob' can be obtained by anonymous ftp from uunet.uu.net [192.48.96.2] in comp.sources.misc/volume6/btoa.Z. Display programs: Obtaining hard copy: -------------------------------------- Detail: 1) to get the file $ftp uunet.uu.net ftp>[login:] anonymous ftp>[Password:] abc ftp> binary ftp> cd comp.sources.misc/volume6 ftp> get btoa.Z ftp> quit 2) to uncompress and un-tar the files $ uncompress btoa.Z You find files "btoa.c", "Makefile", and etc. You may have to delete the mailheader part in "btoa.c" and to modify the "Makefile" to fit your computer. Then $ make Makefile to compile the C programs. You may have to do something like $shell untarmail to make the script file "untarmail" an excutable file. ----------------------------------- Use anonymous ftp to clover.ucdavis.edu [128.120.57.1] and get the file pub/HKU-readnews.tar.Z. Uncompress and then un-tar this file. You will find the source code for a program called news2ps.c, which converts the BIG5-coded articles to postscript format. You will need the font file chinese.16, which is also included in the same tar file. ---------------------------------- Detail: 1) to get the file $ftp clover.ecdavis.edu ftp>[login:] anonymous ftp>[Password:] abc ftp> binary ftp> cd pub ftp> get HKU-readnews.tar.Z ftp> quit 2) $uncompress HKU-readnews.tar.Z $ tar -xmf HKU-readnews.tar It creates a new directory, in which you find "readnews.exe", "shownews.exe", "chinese.16", and 3 demo files (and README). Download them with Kermit to your PC. ------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ Displaying on a PC: You will need a PC with graphic support (mono, cga or vga, *not* vga). Use anonymous ftp to clover.ucdavis.edu [128.120.57.1] and get the file pub/HKU-readnews.tar.Z. Uncompress, un-tar and then download the files to a PC. It contains a font file, several samples articles and programs to read the BIG5-coded artciles. Read the README file for details. Displaying on a Mac: You need HanziTerm, available by anonymous ftp from june.cs.washington.edu under the subdirectory pub/yeung. Get the files HT-read and HT0-2.hqx.Z. Displaying on X window: You need xhzview, which is also available by anonymous ftp from june.cs.washinton.edu [128.95.1.4] in pub/yeung. Get the file xhzview.c. Note that this program display articles encoded in GB format, not in BIG5. Therefore, you need to convert the BIG5-coded articles to GB first. The convertion program is available in the same machine under the same directory. The files are HCu.tar.Z and HCu.patches.vtar.Z. You may want to copy also the files fontUtil and hzfonts for the Chinese fonts in hz format. Wilson Ho ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I did not try the rest. I guess you can follow the examples above, right? Good luck, YuanFrom CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu Fri Aug 3 13:32:16 1990 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by sirius.ctr.columbia.edu (5.64/5.10) with SMTP id AA13108; Fri, 3 Aug 90 13:32:06 -0400 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 3860; Fri, 03 Aug 90 13:31:35 EDT Received: from UGA.BITNET by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3602; Fri, 03 Aug 90 13:31:32 EDT Date: Fri, 3 Aug 90 13:28:53 EDT Reply-To: INR@uga.cc.uga.edu Sender: Chinese Computing Network From: INR@uga.cc.uga.edu Subject: Re-post for Jim Dai To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L Status: RO Date: Fri, 3 Aug 90 10:14:47 PDT From: dai@cauchy.Stanford.EDU (Jim Dai) To: FELSING%OREGON.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu In-Reply-To: Robert Felsing's message of Thu, 2 Aug 90 10:56:00 PDT Subject: atob/btoa Fellow HKU news readers -- As someone with a life-long commitment to never reading the manual and a fear of UNIX and C language, perhaps someone can under- stand and help me. 1) Are BtoA and AtoB available anywhere as executable files? I seem to find nothing but C source code. I truly understand the usefulness of source code, but -- in my case -- only as a terrible last resort. nroff -man btoa.man if you have a file called btoa.man, replace btoa.man to btoa.1 or btoa.l in the last command line if you have one of them. 2) Is it possible for someone to re-send the first three transmissions of theHKU news in repaired version? It turns out that the first three HKnews to Stanford computers were corrupted. The "^" charater was replaced by "~". Mr Hui found the fix. do (assume you save it as hk.news) cat hk.news | tr '~' '^' | btoa -a > hk.big or cat hk.news | tr '~' '^' | atob > hk.big 3) After reading many references to Byx, I would really like to find Byx in any version -- it sounds fascinating even as version 1. I would be most appreciative of any help. As a user of an ancient IBM clone, you can perhaps better understand my appreciation. -- Bob Felsing, University of Oregon --- Good luck