NewsRog 1.8 Update To use this update, you must have already installed NewsRog 1.0-1.7. Click on the supplied Update_1.8 icon in order to begin the install process. Changes in NewsRog 1.8b o Bug Fix: The uudecoder will now successfully skip blank lines. o Bug Fix: The documentation for the PctCaps selection filter was incorrect. o Bug Fix: The followup button no longer causes NewsRog to crash if the editor window position has not been snapshot. o Bug Fix: The ARexx post SET commands (SETSUBJ, etc) were broken and now work. o New Feature: There is a new ARexx INSFILE post command. o New Feature: Headers can be displayed in an arbitrary order, selectable via drag and drop. The HideHeader display filter now permits a list of AmigaOS patterns to be entered. Headers will be displayed in the order they are matched by the patterns. If the pattern matches more than one header, the matched headers will be displayed in the order they are found in the article. See the reference documentation for the HideHeader for more information. o Change: The maximum string length for multimedia action arguments has been increased. o Bug Fix: NewsRog will no longer crash upon encountering a URL longer than about 170 characters. o Bug Fix: A URL that contains a string that looks like an email address is now displayed correctly. o New Feature: There is a line wrap formatting option to the EmpHeader display filter which allows certain headers, such as Newsgroups: and References:, to have each of their entries displayed on a separate line. This avoids very long header lines for these fields. See the reference documentation for the EmpHeader filter for more information. o New Feature: When saving file from MIME or UUencoded data blocks, NR will prompt if the file to be written already exists. You may save over the old file, chose a new filename, or cancel the operation. o Change: The Save/Save As/Action buttons in data blocks now occupy the left 50% of the block width, to make them easier to access for very wide images. o New Feature: There is a new "Start Article" setting in the main configuration which controls the positioning of the cursor when a group window is opened. The cursor may be placed on the article it was on when the group was last closed (unless that article has expired), on the thread entry point of that article, or on the first or last articles in the article list. o New Feature: There is a "Browse Articles" setting in the main configuration which determines which articles are skipped and which are shown when using the article browsing commands (such as +/- or page up/down on the numeric keypad). You can chose to browse all articles (the default), only unread articles, only new articles, or both. Broken articles are skipped in all cases and must be retried by double clicking on them or using the return key. o Change: The included version of TextEditor has been updated to 15.6. Changes in NewsRog 1.8a o Bug Fix: Memory corruption bug fixed. Changes in NewsRog 1.8 o New Feature: The ARexx DISPART command now accepts Message-ID's as well as an ordinal list position. o Change: The text selection mechanism does not start selecting text until the mouse cursor has moved two pixels. This means that a single character is no longer copied to the clipboard when clicking on email address, URL's, or other clickable links. o Change: The default pattern for the save & insert requestors in the multimedia actions list has been changed to "MMAction.*". o New Feature: There is an autosave option in the project area of the configuration window which will autosave the NewsRog project each time a group window is closed (unless it is closed via the "Close (NoSave)" menu option. o New Feature: Test posts to non-test groups are now detected, and NewsRog offers the choice of sending the post to alt.test, cancelling the post and returning to the post editor, or proceding with the post anyway. o New Feature: When opening a group window, NewsRog now starts the article list cursor on the same article it was left on when the group was last closed, if that article is still available, even if that article is not a thread base article. o New Feature: There is a ${getenv} function to return the value of an AmigaOS environment variable. o New Feature: There is a ${concat} function to concatenate words with a specified separator string between them. o New Feature: There is a ${default} function to return the value of a variable, if it is bound, or a given string otherwise. o New Feature: There is a ${replace} function to replace a given substring in a string with a new substring. o New Feature: There is experimental support for defining functions within the variable language. See the variable reference documentation for details. o New Feature: The EMail display filter now has a feature for detecting article Message-ID's. The Message-ID format is which also happens to be the most common format for writing email addresses as well, so most newsreaders cannot tell the difference between the two when such a string occurs in an article body. However, NewsRog has a heuristic which can tell the difference with an accuracy in excess of 99% (just 4 of over 3500 such strings randomly selected from the alt.test group were misidentified). Message-ID's have a NewsRog MIME type of application/X-MsgID, and you may define popup menu multimedia actions for them just like for email addresses or URL's. When clicking with the left mouse button on a Message-ID, NewsRog will move to that message in the article list and display the message if it is available. When clicking with the right mouse button, a popup menu displaying the multimedia actions for application/X-MsgID is displayed. o New Feature: Holding down the alt key while selecting text in the clipboard will allow you to multiselect several regions of text, and will bypass the AutoClip feature if it is turned on. For instance, you can alt-doubleclick to select a word, move the mouse cursor to another word, and alt-doubleclick to select that word and drag to select several more adjacent ones, while leaving the first word selected. By itself this is not useful, but it is meant for use in conjunction with other features which allow actions to be performed on selected text. o Change: Since the article view area now has a popup menu, the group window menus are no longer available when the mouse cursor is over this area. Instead, move the mouse cursor elsewhere in the window to access the group window menus. o New Feature: Text that is selected in the article viewer may be used in multimedia actions. The NewsRog MIME type is application/X-Text, and you may define multimedia actions that will appear in a popup menu when the right mouse button is pressed over the article view area. The variable ${SelTxt} may be used in a multimedia action and will return the currently selected text. It has several optional parameters; see the variable reference documentation for details. There are many potential uses for this, including interfacing NewsRog to web search engines and translation services. For example, perhaps you are reading the newsgroup sci.space.news and see an article text about NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft. You can alt-double-click the word NASA, and separately alt-double-click and drag over Mars Climate Orbiter, and then select "Search:Yahoo" from the NewsRog popup context menu. NewsRog will then formulate a query to the Yahoo web directory asking for pages about both NASA and "Mars Climate Orbiter"! You may load multimedia actions for several popular web search directories from the Objects subdirectory of NewsRog by clicking the "Insert..." button under the Multimedia Actions tab and double clicking the files. If you have a NewsRog variable called "Browser" defined, this will be used as your web browser. Otherwise, Work:IBrowse/IBrowse is used as the default. Please see the new NewsRog tutorial #16 on this topic for more information. o New Feature: Action filters now have an option for marking articles as read after they have been processed. o New Feature: Spaces in a newsgroups list will be automatically removed before a post is sent to the network. o New Feature: There is a popup crosspost editor list available in the post list window. You can drag groups from the main group list window, the server group list, or the list of subscribed groups on the right side of the popup window, into the lefthand list to add them to the crosspost list for this article. You can remove them using the delete button or by dragging groups from the left list into the right one. See the Posts tutorial for more information. o Bug Fix: Using the kill articles option in the group window would not work unless there was an active article in the article list. o New Feature: There is a new placement option for the filter function toolbar; the icons may be placed with those that are already part of the article view toolbar. o Bug Fix: Highlight filters were not being run after a batch download. They now are. o New Feature: The MIME type message/rfc822 is now displayed as an imbedded message in a multipart MIME document. o New Feature: There is now a selectable preferences setting which will chose between quoted-printable encoding and 8bit (no encoding) when posting articles containing non-ASCII data. This can be controlled separately for post bodies and post headers. o Bug Fix: Previously, if an article was aborted in mid-transfer (for instance, if the abort button is pushed before it was done loading), the article would not be re-fetched from the network the next time it was displayed. Now it will be. o Bug Fix: If nested group-specific filters were used, editing one of them and then closing the group would cause NewsRog to crash. o New Feature: The Rewrap display filter can now detect tabular data and display it in a fixed sized font with no line wrapping even if the rest of the article is displayed in a proportional font. This feature is disabled by default; it must be explicitly enabled by editing the Rewrap filter and clicking on the "Table Heuristics" checkbox. This feature will allow you to use an easy to read proportional font for reading article text, yet have items such as Aminet charts or a table of race results displayed in a logical manner without having to turn off the rewrap filter to avoid rewrapping the table lines. Note that there is no information in usenet posts to indicate what is and is not a table. Although NewsRog uses an advanced heuristic for detecting tables which typically works quite well, this can never be done perfectly. It is quite possible for NewsRog to miss some types of tables, particularly if they are small or not well formatted. But in most cases, this feature works quite well. Please see the reference documentation for the Rewrap filter for more information on automated table detection. o Change: The Rewrap filter has been rewritten for improved performance on very large posts. There should be no significant behavioral differences. o Bug Fix: The Rewrap filter would previously insert an extra blank line when quoted text ended at the right hand wrap border. This no longer happens. o Bug Fix: Previously, it was possible for the rewrap filter to enter an infinite loop if a very long word that would not fit on a single line was present with whitespace before it in the original post. This has been fixed. o New Feature: If the character before a URL matched by the URL filter is an open parenthesis, then any closing parenthesis as the last character of a URL will be removed. This allows URLs to contain parentheses in cases such as: HTTP://www.foo.bar/some/path/(with_parens) but will not include parentheses in the URL when the entire URL is enclosed by them, as in: (HTTP://www.foo.bar/)