To use this update, you must have already installed NewsRog 1.0 through
1.6. Click on the supplied Update_1.7 icon in order to begin the install
process.
| Changes for NewsRog 1.7 |
Bug Fix | Toggling the "Use Font" or "Use Color" checkboxes in a
group's configuration settings the 2nd time a group was opened
would crash NewsRog. This has been fixed. |
Change | HTML tags are no longer highlighted as a quote prefix. |
New Feature | The rewrap algorithm now works better on hanging
indents. |
New Feature | The DblSpace selection filter can now optionally
match subjects with any alternately repeating character, such as
(T*h*i*s I*s S*p*a*m*!). |
New Feature | Random tagline files are now supported. The format
is identical to the format used by the popular YAM mail software. See
the Configuration Options tutorial in the NewsRog documentation for
more information. |
Bug Fix | Sorting permanent articles before nonpermanent, or read
before unread, was broken and has been fixed. |
New Feature | There is a posting rate filter which can select
threads according to the number of posts they get per unit time
period. This is useful for showing very active or very inactive
threads. It's not as useful as a kill filter, because killing
articles affects the number of articles in the thread, and thus
the posting rate statistics. |
New Feature |
Filters can now have a user defined toolbar icon
which can be used to toggle that filter on/off and update the article
list or article view with a single click. This makes commonly used
filters easier to access. The Filter Toolbar Location setting in the
Program Options / Window Options configuration area controls the
location of this toolbar in the group window. There is also an option
available for including a filter's description as a label under the
filter icon, in which case it will be set to bold text when the filter
is enabled, and standard text otherwise.
There are several 24-bit 50x30 icons supplied in the Images/Filter
directory of NewsRog. These icons are designed for use on truecolor
(16 or 24 bit) displays in at least 800x600 resolution. They are not
optimal for register screens (less than or equal to 256 colors),
but any graphic for which there is a datatype present on your system
may be used as a button image. |
Bug Fix | The "Any/All" gadgets in filter lists now have bubble
help. |
Bug Fix | Information about the Any/All mode of filters has been
added to the selection filter tutorial. |
Change | When using the close gadget or Cancel button in the post
editor which is editing a new post, NewsRog will now prompt for
whether the post should be deleted or sent to the Post Queue. The
behavior when editing old posts is unchanged. |
New Feature | The first available, or first unread article can now
be automatically display when moving from All Threads mode to One
Thread mode in the group reader window. |
New Feature | The Batch D/L buttons in the group list window now
have keyboard shortcuts. |
New Feature | There is a SENDPOST ARexx command available for
sending one or more queued posts to the network. |
Change | The Toolbar Style and Article List Weight configuration
option have been moved from the Misc Options area to the Window
Options area. |
New Feature | A print menu is available in the group menu structure
which can be used to send the currently display article (with or
without headers) to the printer. The printer device is defined in
the configuration window under Program Options / Misc Options /
Printer Device. |
New Feature | A Spoiler display filter is available which can
either display multi-page articles which have pages separated by a
formfeed character, or act as a spoiler protector for spoilers
separated by a formfeed character. |
Change | The algorithm for generating abbreviations from user names
has been changed for the case where there is only one name
present. Instead of returning the first 5 characters of this
name, only the first character is returned. |
New Feature | Although NewsRog's variable strings are not intended to
be a complete language, a useful set of formatting and math functions
has been added to the variable lookup language. These include:
Command(s) | | Description |
abbrev | generate abbreviations/acronyms |
and,or,not | boolean logic |
bytes | format a byte count into Kb or Mb with decimal |
charcount | counts instances of characters in a string |
bound | test whether a variable name is bound |
cond | evaluate multiple conditions |
if | conditional test |
min,max | find minimum or maximum of numbers |
pad | pad numbers or strings ("5" -> "005") |
remchars | remove characters from a string |
repeat | repeat string |
strlen | return length of string |
substr | return substring from string |
toupper,tolower | case conversion |
word | return Nth word of a series of words |
wordcount | find number of words in a string |
+,-,*,/,% | math |
<,>,<=,>=,!=,= | numeric or string comparisons |
For full details on these functions, see the Functions section of the
variable reference documentation. Note that if a function is
cumbersomely long for inclusion in a single string gadget, it is often
useful to create custom variables for subsections of it in the
Variables tab of the Config window, a tactic which also allows its use
from multiple locations without repeating the source. |
Bug Fix | The PRI option to the ${exec} function was being ignored. |
New Feature | Display filters can now modify article text when it is
saved to a disk file, printed, or used in generating a reply. There
are new options in the Global Info tab of the filter editor which
control this behavior. "Enabled" acts as it always has; if this is
checked, then the filter is used to modify displayed articles. if
"For Printing" is checked, it is also used to modify article text for
printing. "Saving" does similar for article text saved to a disk
file, and "Replies" uses the filter when generating replies to
articles.
Not all filters can be used in this manner. It only applies to
textual modifications. For example, the URL filter, which generates
clickable URL links for articles displayed in the article view area,
cannot be used to modify a pure text stream, so these options are
unavailable in its editor window. Some filters also act in a
different manner when used to process text in this fashion. For
instance, the uudecode filter removes binaries entirely instead of
displaying them as inline graphics.
Some filters have additional parameters to control their operation
when used to modify replies or saved/printed text. For example, the
Rewrap filter usually wraps proportional text to a given percentage of
the total display width. When used as a text-only filter, it can wrap
to a user defined number of columns, such as 72.
If the MIME filter is enabled for replies, it will decode
quoted-printable text before importing it into the post editor. |
Bug Fix | The HTML dimensions of the Server Groups' window in tutorial
#5 were incorrect. |
Change | The HTML documentation has many new screenshots and extensive
additions in many areas. Screenshots from older versions of
NewsRog have been updated to reflect the most current version, and a
number of ommissions have been corrected. |
New Feature | The SP=STARTPROJ/K command line option has been changed
to SP=STARTPROJ/M, which allows a project name to be given on the
command line without the use of the STARTPROJ or SP keywords. Only
one project name is permitted. If present, the SP=STARTPROJ keyword
works as before. |
Change | The memory cache algorithm for article data has been changed
so that the currently displayed article will never be deleted from the
memory cache even if it is larger than the current memory cache
settings for that group. |
Bug Fix | If the "Mem cache articles" setting for the group was a
multiple of 16, memory corruption would result when the memory cached
filled up. |
Bug Fix | Reading articles of various sizes in certain combinations
could result in a memory cache related crash. |
New Feature | A new button and key combination is available for
removing selected articles or threads from the current article list
without killing those articles. Lower case 'z' will remove selected
articles, and upper case 'Z' will remove all articles in the same
threads as the selected articles. This functionality is also
available from new "Article_List/Remove/Selected_Articles" and
"Selected_Threads" menus. Articles removed in such a manner will be
visible the next time the group is opened (unless they were expired or
removed via some other means), and can be restored to the current view
at any time by using the new "Article_List/Remove/UnRemove" menu
option. |
Bug Fix | Some (broken) news servers return a successful return code
from the NNTP ARTICLE/HEAD/BODY commands (return codes 220, 221, 222),
but then do not return any lines of text. Previously, this would
crash NewsRog. This is extremely poor behavior on the part of a news
server, but the error is now handled successfully in NewsRog, which
will display a broken icon next to that article. |
New Feature | There is a settable policy option in the main config
window which controls NewsRog's behavior if the number of articles to
be downloaded from a group exceeds the group's Max Articles count.
You may chose to silently ignore the oldest articles, or to download
all articles (ignoring the Max Articles setting), or to prompt for
what to do (only for non-batch operations). |
New Feature | The maximum number of articles to download in a group,
and the number of article headers to keep when the group window is
closed, are now separate controls and may be adjusted independently.
Unless it is set separately, the "Max to Keep on Exit" parameter
defaults to the value of MaxArticles for that group, so the behavior
is the same as in version 1.6. |
New Feature | The MIME display filter now has a "No-Display Types"
setting, which can be set to an AmigaOS pattern matching zero or
more MIME types which will not be displayed. This is useful for
filtering out things such as text/html. |
Change | The BadWrap Fix option is now on by default in the Rewrap
display filter. This will not affect old projects, only newly created
Rewrap filters after version 1.7. |
Change | The default UI mode for the HLQuotes option is now scrolled
quote blocks, rather than toggled quote blocks. This will not affect
old projects, only newly created HLQuotes filters after version 1.7. |
Bug Fix | Continuation lines in article headers are handled better now.
These would occasionally break things in version 1.6 and older, such
as references threading or certain MIME features. |
Bug Fix | Some MIME-encoded images are posted with the filename in the
filename attribute of the Content-Disposition field rather than the
more standard name attribute of the Content-Type field. The MIME
display filter now handles both cases. |
New Feature | If there are non-ASCII characters present in a post (or
the associated sig file), it will be transmitted as a text/plain MIME
document using quoted-printable encoding in the character set you have
specified in the main config window. There is not yet a provision for
attaching binary files such as images to posts. Note that while such
a document is mostly human-readable, the quoted-printable encoding
enforces certain restrictions. For example, lines longer than 75
characters _after_ encoding will be transmitted as a sequence of multiple
lines with one or more "soft" linebreaks, and thus may appear to be
wrapped in a less than readable manner on newsreaders without MIME
support. There are similar limitations for whitespace at the end of
lines and for the transmission of an ASCII equal ('=') sign. |
New Feature | The character set used for composing and reading posts is
now settable in the main configuration window. This should match the
character set used by your font(s). ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) is common
for Amiga fonts but there are other possible choices. This setting
will be transmitted as the charset parameter of the MIME Content-Type
field when you post a document that requires quoted-printable
encoding. |
New Feature | The post editor has a new preview mode accessed via the
same cycle gadget that has always switched between the editor and
preview modes. The new preview mode "View Encoding" will display the
raw quoted-printable encoding of the current document, both headers
and body lines. In this mode you may see quoted-printable encoding
markers such as "=3D", and soft line breaks. The other preview modes
("View Wrapped", and "View All") show the actual characters in the
post, and you will not see the quoted-printable encoding. |
New Feature | A CharMap display filter is available which can perform
user defined display time character set translations. |
Bug Fix | A memory leak in the author note feature of filters has been
fixed. |
New Feature | The HELP and USAGE command line options now print the
NewsRog usage template to stdout. |
New Feature | A new column in the group list is available which
displays the moderation status of a group. This information defaults
to No (not moderated) and is only updated if you perform a "Read
Description" operation on that group. Thereafter it will be stored
with the group, so this only needs to be done once. |
Change | Parantheses are no longer added as part of a user name
abbreviation. |
Bug Fix | Using the "Limit to Selected" group window menu option with
no articles selected would result in NewsRog getting stuck in an
infinite loop. The same bug was causing one fewer articles than were
actually selected to be displayed. |
Change | The minimum stack size for NewsRog has been increased to 80 Kb. |