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TurboGopher 1.0.8b4 January 27, 1994

Haikei,

David Johnson de gozaimasu. Doozo yoroshiku.

Version 1.0.8b4 changes: ------------------------

1. Color icons work correctly on any screen depth. Used to be black & white on screens of greater than 8 bit depth (256 colors).

Also fixing this fixed some of the crashes caused by my earlier method of doing color icons. :-)

3. Search items now use their display string for the prompt. Makes the ftp prompt more appropriate, for example.

3. Now do ugly '.jpg' & '.jpeg' extension checking on the generic image type of 'I'. Previously only did 'gif' & 'pict' extension checking.

Previous Version 1.0.8b3 announcement -------------------------------------

TurboGopher 1.0.8b3 October 27, 1993

1. I have changed the way TurboGopher detects the Japanese code being used for menu (directory) items. In version 1.0.8b2 TurboGopher attempted to detect the code of each individual item by looking at only that items information. Because of overlapping code space between EUC & SJIS this resulted in cases where I could not be sure if the information was in EUC or SJIS encoding.

When I was unable to precisely determine the code I did not attempt to translate into SJIS.

Now I attempt to detect the code by looking at all the information in a directory. This results in a more accurate detection & translation into SJIS.

Previous Version 1.0.8b2 announcement -------------------------------------

TurboGopher 1.0.8b2 October 25, 1993

1. Menu (directory) items in JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard), & EUC (Extended UNIX Code) encoding systems can now be viewed correctly when the 'Japanese Filtering' option is selected (checked). Previously the Japanese Filtering option was only applied to the contents of text files that were retrieved. Sites with document or directory titles in Shift-JIS were correctly displayed in the past. Now JIS & EUC items will also be displayed correctly.

2. Additional support was added for the correct display of Japanese text received from a CSO name server (directory) look up.

Previously all information returned from a directory look up was displayed in the Monaco font. While this made all the columns line up, it did not display the Japanese Language correctly.

Here is how it now works. If the font selected by a user is Osaka, and the 'Japanese Filtering' option is on; the information returned by a directory look up will be displayed in the Osaka Font and the Japanese should be displayed correctly.

Warning: This will only work if the Japanese portion is encoded in Shift-JIS. I looked but found no sites returning JIS or EUC.

If you know of a site that does return JIS or EUC please send an email to Dave Johnson at dmj@boombox.micro.umn.edu with the name and location of the site.

Previous Version 1.0.8b1 announcement -------------------------------------

TurboGopher 1.0.8b1 October 19, 1993

This version of TurboGopher has a special feature that will interest people with a love of the Japanese Language. Those who have visited the Gopher Servers in Japan will have noticed that files often have a JIS extension (Japanese Industrial Standard), SJIS extension (Shift-JIS, also called MS-Kanji), or an EUC extension (Extended UNIX Code). These signify different methods of encoding Japanese on computer systems.

The KanjiTalk System, or System 7.1 with the Japanese Language Kit provide the ability to handle the SJIS encoding. Merely place TurboGopher on a Macintosh with the above, select a Japanese font such as Osaka and retrieve files with the SJIS extension. Then all that is needed is the ability to read Japanese. :-)

The other two encoding schemes JIS, and EUC if retrieved display as a jumble of unreadable characters no matter which font is selected.

Fortunately, I had heard of some nice algorithms for converting JIS, and EUC encodings into SJIS which the Macintosh can display.

Recently an excellent book by Ken Lunde, Understanding Japanese Information Processing (Nihongo Joho Shori) was published by O'Reilly & Associates. At a very reasonable cover price of approximately $29.95. This book is a very valuable reference. For those interested the ISBN is 1-56592-043-0.

The combination of the book and some code samples, provided the necessary knowledge to add to TurboGopher a new option.

1. This new option is under the Setup menu and is called 'Japanese Filtering'. Select this option and it will become checked signifying it is enabled. Being enabled means that TurboGopher checks incoming text to determine if it is Japanese. If Japanese is detected it determines the encoding scheme: SJIS, JIS, or EUC; and if necessary converts it to the SJIS codes.

2. Also some last remaining English language strings were moved from the program into string resources that are easily changed to localize TurboGopher for other languages.

3. The other unrelated change in this version of TurboGopher is that the icons displayed in directory listings now have some colorized versions. Another column was added for an icon to indicate whether an item is an Gopher+. Expect more development around this. :-)

I would appreciate receiving comments from native speakers of Japanese on the Japanese Filtering option. I visited all of the Japanese Gopher sites I was aware of testing the Filtering option.

In the cases I tested it worked wonderfully. It was a pleasure to have more files to practice my Japanese reading skills on. :-)

Comments regarding TurboGopher & Japanese, or other languages can be sent to Dave Johnson at dmj@boombox.micro.umn.edu.

It would be very pleasing to have a localized version of TurboGopher for every language.

Thanks, Dave Johnson