PC Online 1998 September/PCO_0998.ISO/filesbbs/os2/pms_117.arj/PMS_117.ZIP/whats.new

Text File | 1998-07-20 | 10.8 KB | 283 lines

New in PMStripper 1.17

Fixed a bug that could cause PMStripper it to abort.
This could happen if the user had too much text marked when
the user pressed ALT+S or selected "Save As" from the menu.
With the fix, if there are more than 1024 characters the
program does not attempt to use the marked text as a filename.
If there are less then 1024 and more than 254 marked characters,
the text is truncated and then used as the file name.

Added a 'Translate quotes' to the strip options. This option
translates the "smart quotes" used on some web pages into the
standard ascii values (0x93 and 0x94 are changed to 0x22).  The
"smart apostrophes" are translated to standard ascii (0x91 and
0x92 are changed to 0x22). The two "special hyphen" characters
are translated to standard ascii (0x96 and 0x97 are changed to
0x2d).  The 0x85 character is translated into 3 periods (0x2e)
to approximate an elipsis character.  In addition the 0xA0 and
the 0x99 characters are translated to a space. The translation is
done before any html character enties are translated, so this option
should not effect languages that use those characters as part of
their normal text.

Added an 'Only http type' option to the URL options. This option
limits the URLs to those links containing a http reference. The
"normal" URL detection looks for htlm code containing href and will
find gopher, ftp, mailto, and relative links to other web pages as
well as complete URLs.


New in PMStripper 1.16

This release fixes two bugs that were introduced in prior
versions.

If the "Ignore <BR>" setting was active when the
settings were saved, it was not checked on the menu the next
time PMStripper was loaded.

The URLs were not being detected correctly.


New in PMStripper 1.15

Fixed a bug that caused the program to crash when an unmatched
'<' character was in the source file.  This happens most often
when a '<' is part of the text and it is not replaced with the
HTML code of < .

Added a option to allow the user to enter a default extent for
the stripped file when it is saved to disk.


New in PMStripper 1.14

Fixed a problem that occured when the user tried to copy
more than 64K of text to the OS/2 Clipboard. In previous
versions, the program would abort without any warning or
error messages.

Made most of the menu bar selections inactive when a file
is being loaded and/or stripped.  It was possible to cause
the program to crash, if the user tried to modify the
stripping options while an html source file was being stripped.

Added menu item for the default directory to be used
for html source files and an entry to enable the feature.
The enable option is only available on the registered
version of PMStripper.

Modified the menu selections so that options only available
in the registered version are not selectable.

Modified the ignore CR-LF option to reduce the number of
blanks inserted in place of the CR-LF pairs.

Added "Ignore cr-lf" and "Ignore <BR>" settings to the saved values.

added codes for the brain dead windows webmasters
• and •  now converted to 0xfe

Changed menu bar shortcut to "l" instead of "F" on File.
In previous releases, the only way to see the menu under File
was to use the mouse to select File.  THis change does not
alter how any of the other accelator key function. ALT-F still
brings up the open file dialog box

Made the file save operations run on a separate thread.


New in PMStripper 1.13
HTML 4.0 adds hexidecimal numeric character references , and this
version adds support for hexidecimal numbers.  The supported numeric
character references are restricted to what will display on code pages
437 ands 850. Support for numeric character references above decimal 255
or hex 0xff has not been added.

How PMStripper looks for URLs has been modified so that "href" is
treated as the start of a URL.


New in PMStripper 1.12
This is another bug fix release. There was a minor problem introduced
in version 1.11 which has been fixed in this release. The default
name when saving a stripped file was 11111 in version 1.11 due to
some test code that should have been removed.

An error in the translation of one of the international characters
was corrected in this release.  This error had been present since
version 1.03.


New in PMStripper 1.11
This is a bug fix for an error that occured when the last
line of a web page was not terminated by a newline character.
This resulted in that line being discarded.

New in PMStripper 1.10

This is a bug fix release that fixes a bug in the registered version.
The fix filters some additional characters from any text that is marked
when a save is rquested.


New in PMStripper 1.09

Registered users of PMStripper will have access to two additional
executable files that were compiled with the 486 and 586 compiler
options.  These versions will offer some performance improvement
for users with 468 , Pentium, or equivalent CPUs.

BUG Fixes

Earlier versions of PMStripper would abort if the user tried to
strip a web page that was all HTML codes.  What actually happened
is that the program tried to load a file that was only one character
long after it was stripped.  The IOC library funtion that loaded
the file into an MLE window would abort due to an exception.  The
simple fix was to add a blank line to the stripped text so that all
stripped files are at least one line long.

New in PMStripper 1.08

This is a bug fix release.

In prior versions it was possible to input a illegal file name and
cause the program to abort. This happened when the ALT+S and Ctrl+S
file save options were used when there were illegal characters or
more than 256 characters in the marked text.

In prior versions, there was a problem in the way the HTML comments
were handled.  This could cause the program to abort if the end of
the HTML comment was not detected.


New in PMStripper 1.07

Quick Save  ( Ctrl+S accelerator )

When the user has marked text to be used as the file name or wants
to use the default name for the saved file, this function saves the
file without bringing up the OS/2 file dialog box.

Quick Print ( Alt+P accelerator )

When the user wants to print the stripped file, this option sends the
stripped file to the OS/2 default printer. If you have more than one
printer, the default printer is set from one of the printer objects on
your desktop.

The file that is sent to the printer is not formatted by PMStripper.
Since word wrap in the PMStripper display window does not reformat the
text, line lengths must be user adjusted to fit the printer.


Raw HTML display  ( Ctrl+R accelerator )

This function reloads the HTML source file and displays it without
stripping any of the HTML codes.  This was added so that the user
would still have an easy way to display the raw HTML codes when
PMStripper was installed as the HTML source viewer in the IBM Web
Explorer.


BUG Fixes

Fixed an HTML stripping bug that resulted in a ';' character added
to a single '&' character and the ';' being stripped from unknown
character entities.

Corrected a problem that caused a write error message to be displayed
if a file save was canceled when the file already existed.


New in PMStripper 1.06

Bug Fix: Using PMStripper as WebX viewer for HTML source

When PMStripper is used as the viewr for HTML source in WebX,
the 'Reload Source File' and the 'Save As' selections were greyed
out unless the source file is reloaded via 'Open File'.  This
has been corrected in version 1.06

PMSTRIP.INI handling

For PMStripper users who wish to add an environment variable to their
config.sys file, PMStripper will use that environment variable to
determine where the PMSTRIP.INI is located if it is not found in the
working directory.

For those users who never change any of the configuration options, I
have eliminated the automatic creation of the PMSTRIP.INI file.  The
file will only be created when 'Save Settings' is selected.

The environment variable is specified in your config.sys file.

SET PMSTRIPPER=C:\YOURPATH

The C:\YOURPATH should be changed to the location of PMStripper or
the drive and directory that you want to locate the PMSTRIP.INI file
Embedded NULLs

I found a web site (the IBM Alphaworks site) that had web pages with
embedded NULL characters.  Since a NULL character terminates a string
in C/C++ , this caused some problems with PMStripper.  I have added a
filter to replace the NULL characters with space characters before
processing the html code.

Default settings

I have changed the default settings based on feedback from the
registered users of PMStripper.  The only setting that is now
enabled is the use of the underscore character.

New in version 1.05

Over write of existing file warning

A check has been added to warn the user if he is about to overwrite
an existing file. If the file is write protected an error message is
displayed.  If the file is not write protected, the user is prompted
for an 'Ok' or 'Cancel' response.

More Fonts

All of the installed fonts are now available via the font dialog box.
Also, the font that is active when 'Save Settings' is selected will
become the default font.

New stripping options

'Strip Options' has two sub-menu items: 'Ignore <BR>' and 'Ignore
cr-lf'. These items are mutually exclusive and, since they are not
normally needed, are not saved via the "Save Settings" menu item. These
options are useful when the stripped output has excessive blank lines,
not present in the source file.  This often occurs in Web published
poetry since many are formatted with both carriage return - line feed
(cr-lf) pairs and the HTML code <BR> which prevents text reformatting
by the browser. PMStripper normally translates <BR> into a cr-lf pair
thereby producing unnecessary blank lines. These two menu items strips
either the cr-lf pairs OR the <BR> codes from the text before any other
actions are performed.  The results of using either option should be
similar, but one method may produce better results depending on how the
text was originally formatted.

Reload HTML source file via ALT+R accelerator

The 'Reload Source File' menu item reloads the current HTML file and
is a handy way to make changes in the the stripper's options and then
view the same HTML, processed differently.  This bypasses the file
dialog box.

Printing

To directly print the stripped text, select a printer as the file's
destination. Entering 'lpt1' or 'lpt2' (as the file name) will send the
text to a printer.  This method bypasses the WPS print manager and
results in using the printer's default font. Additionally, since word
wrap in the PMStripper display window does not reformat the text, line
lengths must be user adjusted to fit the printer.  This is not new, but
has not been documented.