Voyager
You Are Going Places!
Copyright © 1995-96 Oliver Wagner
(owagner@lsd.wupper.de)
All Rights Reserved.
See About Voyager
for full license information!
· Goto Voyager Web page
· Goto Voyager-NG page
· Goto Vaporware general home page
·
Contents of this document:
Introducing Voyager 1.0
Voyager 1.0 is a freely distributable WWW
browser for AmigaOS.
It's range of features covers:
- It's faaaast. On the average, Voyager outruns any other available Amiga
Web browser by a factor of two.
- Supports the full HTML-2 standard as described in RFC-1866, including
forms. It doesn't want to be a reference
implementation, though, and tries to make the best even out of malformed
documents.
- Supports many proposed so called HTML-3 extensions.
- Supports Client Side Image Maps.
- Supports Netscape-Level 1 (NHTML) extensions, including <center>,
floating
images, background images and text coloring (both RGB and named colors).
- Supports HTTP access authorization.
- Supports ftp, gopher and wais via proxy.
- Supports news: usenet news reading and posting.
- Document cache with optional automatic last-modified-date-based verify.
- Versatile hierarchical bookmark system, allowing export in HTML format,
menu selection and drag'n'drop sorting.
- Full support for true color displays with V43 datatypes.
- Asynchronous network handling. Multiple windows.
Voyager 1.0 is released now as a free gift to the Amiga community. Our
main development efforts are currently gearing towards the release of
Voyager 2.0 (our internal name is "V - Next Generation"), which is
currently in alpha stage. You can find more information about V-NG on
the Vaporware V-NG page.
Using the Voyager Installer
This is a basic outline of what the Voyager installer does:
1) Asks & Makes Target Directory if not there
2) Copies and/or Updates with Backup the Voyager Binary
3) Copies Needed MUI parts
4) Copies Docs
The Voyager installer is based around the installer binary versions
1.24, 2.17 and 43.1. If you do not have one of these version it
would be best to upgrade now. Installer 2.17 can be found on some of
the OS 3.x install disk. 1.24 and 43.1 are on aminet.
For more Information on the Vapor installers and direct pointers to the
files you can visit the Vapor Installer home
page .
Back to top
Usage
Action buttons
The main interface of Voyager is simple. The row of large buttons across the
top of the window has some essential functions assigned to it. Many of which
are self explanitory but we'll go through them anyway. Note that these
buttons turn to a black and white version of their coloured form when it's
not possible to activate their particular function at that time. The Voyager
active indicator in the top right, displays the bouncing ball animation
while Voyager is busy. Clicking on this will also reveal Voyager's About page.
Fetches the previously accessed page. It wont, however, return to pages
which resolted from Form send requests since they were temporary. Instead
Voyager will skip this page for the last 'real' page.
This button will only work if the Back button has been used at least once.
If the Back button has been used multiple times, so the Forward button will
be usable an equal amount of times.
This button sends Voyager to the configured Home Page. The Home Page is set
up from the Links section of the GUI settings. The GUI settings is accessed
via the settings menu or the Amiga-G hot-key. See the section on Settings.
This button will force V to reload the current page. Technically it will
delete the current cached entries for that page and attempt a reload of the
page with a special no-cache flag. This will force proxy caches to fetch the
page afresh rather than use their cached page. See the section on Proxy.
This button is only active if the 'Load HTML Images Directly' flag is turned
off. This flag is present in the settings menu and can also be toggled with
the Amiga-I hotkey. When this flag is off, Voyager will only load the images
when the Images button is pressed. This allows very quick browsing with
viewing of in-lined pictures and such forth viewed only when you want.
Not yet implemented in the freeware version of Voyager
Prints the current page out the the PRT: device. Only the text which can be
seen in the page will be printed, no HTML codes etc.
Voyager will allow you to cancel downloading of a page and it's associated
in-line images by pressing on this button. Loading of the page can be
restarted with the Reload button if necessary.
Location:![Location](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Location.gif)
This text gadget displays the current URL being accessed by Voyager. When
not active it is denoted as 'Location:' but when activate you'll see a bold
'Goto:' appear. A URL can be entered with any fetch method by hand. If no
fetch method is chosen IE www.cu-amiga.co.uk is entered, Voyager will
automatically assume and add http:// in front of the entry.
To the right of the URL text gadget are two buttons. The first is a pop-up
button which will display the current entries in the stack since Voyager was
activated during this session (and not the entire cache). Next along is a
button with 'ADD' written on it. This will Bookmark the current page being
viewed. For more information on this, see the section on the Bookmark.
![Fastlink buttons](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Fastlinks.gif)
Lastly, the group of elongated buttons just above the main Voyager viewing
window are user configurable fast links. Their presence can be turned off my
the 'Show FastLinks' gadget in the Settings menu. The Fastlinks are edited
from the Links page in the GUI Setting activated from the GUI function in the
settings menu or again, the Amiga-G hotkey.
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The Menus
Voyager
- About
- Shows the Voyager About page. Hotkey Amiga-?
- Cache List
- Directs Voyager to a special internal page which displays the
contents of the on disk cache. This has a special format; Age, Size, Type
and URL are the resulting fields. Age is the cache elements age in days. The
size is the size of the cache element in bytes, type indicates what form the
file is whether text or image etc and finally URL is a link to the actual
page to which the cache element belongs. Hotkey Amiga-C
- Quit
- Asks Voyager to Quit when it is next able. Hotkey Amiga-Q
Windows
- Open New Window
- Instructs Voyager to open a completely new Voyager task
window. This will have all the hallmarks of the original Voyager window and
is subject to MUI's settings by itself which means it can be directed to
another screen as needs be. It will operate asynchronously to the spawning
Voyager window. Hotkey Amiga-O
- Open Local File
- Results in a file requestor which expects a local HTML
file to be chosen which Voyager will then display as normal. Hotkey Amiga-H
- Show Current Document's Source
- This option opens a new window with the
raw HTML source code present inside. Again this is asynchronous and Voyager
can carry on as normal. Hotkey Amiga-X
- Save as HTML
- Opens a file requestor to save our the current page in it's
original HTML format. This can be viewed later with the Open Local File
option. Hotkey Amiga-W
- Save as ASCII Text
- Opens a file requestor to save out the current page.
The difference is that all HTML codes are removed from the document and only
text which would be seen as normal by viewing the page in Voyager will be
saved to a file. Hotkey Amiga-T
- Activate other Voyagers
- Here there will be an entry for every active
Voyager window. By selecting any of them, this window will be made active
and popped to the front. The current URL of each window is displayed along
with the number of the Voyager window.
Bookmarks
- Open Bookmarks
- Opens the Bookmarks GUI. See the page on Bookmarks. Hotkey
Amiga-B
- Goto Bookmarks
- Directs V to a special internal page which lists all of
Voyager's bookmarks in the main listview. The links can be clicked on to
direct Voyager to those particular pages.
- BookMark Custom
- Here you can configure a selection of URLs to be present
in this menu via the Bookmark function.
Settings
- GUI
- Opens the GUI options window for configuring GUI aspects of Voyager.
See the GUI settings page. Hotkey Amiga-G
- Network
- Opens the Network options window for configuring Networking
aspects of Voyager. See the Networking settings page. Hotkey Amiga-H
- Show Fastlinks
- Toggles the Fastlink buttons at the bottom of Voyagers
control panel. The Fastlinks buttons are custom configured in the GUI
settings page.
- Load HTML Images Directly
- With this option on, Voyager will automatically
load all the current in-line pictures in any pages loaded. With this option
off, Voyager will not load the images and instead will wait for the Images
button to be pressed. Hotkey Amiga-I
- Autoview Images/Anims/Audio
- Downloaded data can either be saved out,
will occur if this option is turned off, or automatically piped to
Multiview if this option is enabled. Hotkey Amiga-V
- Ask for Downloads
- If the Autoview Images/Anims/Audio option is disabled,
this function has an effect of prompted a path every time data is to be
saved out, otherwise it will be saved right away to the default download
directory. Hotkey Amiga-D
- User Access Authorisation
- If this option is enabled, Voyager will
send the
username and password for every HTTP access. This is of use for secure sites
where access to certain areas is restricted unless the user is known to the
server. Hotkey Amiga-A
- Set Authorisation Parameters
- This fuction brings up a simple GUI allowing
the username and password to be entered for the Access Authorisation
function of Voyager. Hotkey Amiga-S
- MUI Settings
- Activates MUI's preferences program to work specifically on
the Voyager window which activated the settings via this menu options.
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The Bookmarks
![Bookmarks](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/bookmarks.gif)
The bookmark GUI is activated by selecting Open from the Bookmarks menu or
pressing the Amiga-B hotkey combination. From here URLs can be added,
deleted and edited as your own WWW phone book. Entries made here can be
doubled clicked upon to direct Voyager to that page but more commonly, they
can be accessed via the Bookmarks page which is activated by selecting Goto
BookMarks in the Bookmark menu or alternatively the Amiga-G hotkey.
In addition to this, there's a button on Voyagers control panel marked
'Add'. Pressing this will add the current page directly in as the last entry
in the Bookmarks GUI.
The Bookmark editor has a small listview showing the heirarchy of marked
pages (which is neatly displayed in the same way via the Internal Bookmark
Page). A new Group can be added and named with the New Group button, Hotkey
G. It can not have a URL assigned to it though. This is the name of a group
which is named to house particular types of Bookmarks. For example we might
want to keep Amiga related pages in a Group called 'Amiga WWW pages'. Click
on NewGroup, call it 'Amiga WWW pages' and then add any pages underneath
either by hand with the NewBookmark button (Hotkey B) or by navigating to them
via Voyager in the normal fashion and clicking the 'Add' gadget on Voyager's
control panel. It couldn't be easier. Groups and Bookmarks can be duplicated
with the Duplicate button (Hotkey D) or Removed with the Remove button
Hotkey R.
One Group may also be nominated as a Menu Group with the Menu button, Hotkey
M. All Bookmarks in this group will appear at the bottom of the Bookmark
menu and when selected from the menu will navigate Voyager to those pages.
Internal Bookmark Page
The Internal Bookmark Page, activated by the 'Goto Bookmarks' function in
the bookmarks Menu, only requires a click on the name of a URL to navigate
Voyager to those areas. The entry made in the Bookmarks GUI is named
accordingly to the entry inserted in the BookMark GUI's 'Title' box where as
the actual URL relating to this page can only be seen at the bottom of
Voyager's screen with the mouse hovering over the link. The actual URL is
entered into the Bookmark GUI's 'Name' box.
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GUI Settings
There's 4 sections to the GUI settings window. Each are present as pages,
just click on the exposed tags of each page to move to them. Here's how they
work;
-
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Layout.gif)
- Layout
- The only gadget present is Action Buttons. This only has three
settings. They control the look of the Action Buttons at the top of the
Voyager control panel. By default this is set up for Text and Icons so that
the Action Buttons will be comprised of picture icons with a descriptive
line of text labelling each one. Obviously text only means the buttons will
be only made out of text and Icon's only does away with the text line. This
function is useful if your screen is fairly small such as PAL screenmode
users.
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Colors.gif)
- Color
- This page allows you to customise the colours of various
aspects of
Voyager. The background color is the colour of the standard background
Voyager uses when no background image is present in a HTML page. Text color
is the default text color normally being black. Link color is the color of
a link which hasn't been seen yet, normally red. Followed Link color is the
color of a link to a page which has already been seen, normally blue. Image
Link color is the color of the text shown before an Image is loaded,
normally grey. Click on the color bar will bring up a palette GUI which
enables precise control of the color used.
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Fonts.gif)
- Fonts
- This page allows you to change the fonts used by Voyager to render
the text in the HTML pages. Pay specific attention to the increasing fonts
sizes of the Headline fonts. They are usually preportional which gives a
more pleasing result than a non preportional font. The so-called Fixed Font
must be a non-preportional font since this is used where this effect is
relied upon to format text in a prespecified way.
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Links.gif)
- Links
- Finally the links page allows editing of the Home Page and Fast
Links. The Home Page URL entered here will be the first page Voyager
attempts to load when first started. This URL will also be navigated to when
you click on the Home Action Button. The Fast Links represent the entries
for the Fast Link buttons on the bottom of the control panel. Note that
these can be turned off by the Show Fastlinks switch in the settings menu.
The Label will be the text shown on the buttons while the URL text box
refers to the URL Voyager will attempt to load when that Fast Link is
clicked upon.
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Network Settings
The Network Settings GUI is brought up by selecting Network fromt the
Settings menu. There are three pages to this window which affect Voyager's
behavior as far as it's network connection. To move to each section, click
on the labeled exposed ear of the relevant page.
-
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Proxies.gif)
- Proxies
- This setting depends very much on your provider and/or your
location. If your provider has a WWW proxy cache of it's own then you would
be well advised to configure it here to enhance the performance of Voyager
even further. You'll need to know the name or IP address of the proxy server
and fill this in at least the HTTP box. The port number is also essential.
Normally this is 80 but you must be sure of this value as proxy will not
work if it is incorrect. Enter the name and port for the remaining FTP,
Gopher and WAIS text gadgets unless you specifically want to use seperate
proxy servers for those functions of Voyager.
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Cache.gif)
- Cache
- This text gadget allows you to set the total size of the on-disk
cache Voyager will uses. When Voyager is started, it will scan the Cache
directory (called Cache within the Voyager directory) and delete the oldest
records in order of age until the total size of the on-disk cache is less
than the selected size. Note that the size is in kilobytes. A value of 512
is 512K or half a megabyte. To enter a 10MB on-disk cache, enter 10 x 1024
or 10240 in the text gadget. The Verify Cached Documents flag will instruct
Voyager to enquire as to the status of a cached document when a document is
requested which is present in the on-disk cache. With this function enabled,
Voyager will verify that the page has not changed since the cache entry and
so you will never be left with an out-of-date page in the cache. This option
is recommended.
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/News.gif)
- News
- Here the news server for the News: function of Voyager is defined.
Without a valid NNTP server here that you have access to, you will not be
able to access Usenet news via Voyager. Normally your provider will have
it's own NNTP news server. If you don't know the name, ask your provider.
The Dumb NNTP Server flag needs to be set if you have problems without this
option. Normally Voyager will try and request a list of newsgroups to a
pattern. IE News:comp.sys.amiga.* but several news servers do not understand
this format. If this is the case and an error is reported, turn on this
flag in which case Voyager will request a full list and then show the
pattern matched result by calculating it internally. It will result in a
much longer download but it will work. Be sure and add your Email address and real name in the gadgets provided for this. In addition you may creat a signature that will be appended to your posts to usenet newsgroups in the signature form area.
![](/file/20453/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 08 (1996)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1996-06][EARSAN CD VII].iso/earcd/comm1/voyager.lha/Voyager10/Voyager_Home/VPics/Other.gif)
- Other
- This tab currently supports helpers for "mailto" and "telnet" protocols. These should be configured for whichever apps you wish to have invoked upon clicking on a mailto: or telnet: link.both protocols support %h for the host, and telnet supports %p for the port number.
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Obtaining Voyager Updates
Voyager Updates are available at the Vaporware Support Site