`...` Inf-HTML v0.8b `...`

History of the Inf-HTML package

First closed alpha

Support for Table of Contents display
Support for basic displaying of articles with no support for styles, links, margins, etc. Pretty shocking.
Real rough coding

Decision was made for a rewrite to be done.

Much better error control and reporting. Structured in such a was that any errors will display a message, free all allocated memory, and exit.
More modularisation of code. Full commenting. Better structure.
More comprehensive support for control codes. Styles implemented - bold, underlined, italic, and monospaced examples.
Kludging introduced for left margin.
Graphic buttons introduced.
All support files now must be located in the /inf-html/ directory.
Debug mode seperated from main code. Cleaned up and improved.

First public release... in initial beta testing

Name change from html-inf to inf-html.
Kludged support for inline graphics inclusion.
Look ahead on word wrap to prevent large entries sticking out and looking bad.
Improved layout control to stop line breaks occuring when they shouldn't have and to be there when they should.
Support for really large articles that are larger that one slot. This has not been extensively tested... I added 3 lines of code to do this and it works fine on the 2 articles I tested it on.
Major bug fix - incorrect titles on articles and links failing. This has improved inf-html to the stage where I am prepared to release it for public beta.
Basic documentation included / being written (grin).
Support for another type of in-line linking added.

Second public release... beta testing continues..

Changed the way Table of Contents displays. (all in plain text rather than using heading levels which looked un-nice with WE 0.92mt onward)
Included graphics are now transparent - including Inf-Html, Team Os/2, and Dos inline graphics.
Document title changed to reflect content instead of always
file - x:\...\myfile.inf
If displaying a Table of contents heading is
Inf-HTML: (doc title)
If displaying an article heading is
Inf-HTML: (article heading)
This produces much better WebMaps.
Changed some (hopefully all) references to inline images to include alternate text for text-mode WWW browsers.
A change from WE 0.9 to WE 0.93 meant that IBM Extended ASCII characters used in line-diagrams (for example the Os/2 CmdRef.inf) would no longer display properly. Changes to code mean that (hopefully) &, <, and > symbols should display. IBM Ext ASCII (from 169 to 218) has been remapped to +, -, or |.
Dictionary debugging added to articles using
readinf.cmd?<filename>+text+<article#>+2
This will show when character remapping has occured (from what to what).
Index's supported if in the file. This hasn't been extensivly tested but it looks like it works.

BUGFIX... due to my pathetically shallow knowledge of batch programming I had the file readinf.cmd (when I bothered to include it!) containing a line as such...
x:\path\inf-html.exe %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 %10 %11
for which arguments 10 and 11 are interpreted as 1 with a 0 after it...
I searched the code, using a debugger, for hours to figure out why some TOC's were not being displayed properly... arrr...
Code rehaul / cleanup to try and move from Borland C to ANSI C for portability reasons.
A "Conversion" executable was developed using precompiler instructions. This changed a Inf/Hlp file into a series of Html files.
Table of Contents display with unordered lists.
Due to ongoing problems with the way lynx interperets <pre> (ie. adds a carriage return) a decision was made to rewrite the article display code to be fully monospaced.

Third public beta release.... onward, upward, forward!

A complete re-write and overhaul from the ground up. Expect some new bugs due to this.
Now makes extensive use of pre-compiler statements to support the generation of INF-FILE, and DEBUG, from the same engine. Seperated into multiple source files for better management.
A semi-proper command line parser was added to stop really dumb things causing SYS Errors.
Displays all articles with mono-spaced. A much better (although more complex, probably slower, and maybe bug filled) word wrap engine developed (on Christmas Eve) which was a BIG code headache!
Centered graphics are displayed with <center> that is supported by WebExplorer and NetScape.
No more little arrow graphics, or [to].
Tested for display with IBM WebExplorer v0.95, NetScape v1.0 for Windows, and Lynx.
BUGFIX - Multi-TOC articles did not reset "space=true" which caused some interesting results. This should not be reset if in the middle of a preformatted example.
BUGFIX (hopefully) - If two spaces occured after a fullstop at the end of a line the next line was indented a space.

A search engine might be on its way... I have to find 2 minutes to look at the search tables in the files.
Support for centered text, right justified text, would be 1) nice, 2) a challenge!
I was thinking another executable that did "to TeX" or "to LaTeX" conversions would be nice. Still in though stage.
It would be nice to have something to pull all the graphics out of a Inf/Hlp file and turn them into GIF's. (Anyone volunteer?).

Some of these aren't really bugs 'cause I never said it would work with all Inf/Hlp files and it doesn't ;-(
The Os/2 Personal Magazine v1.01a won't go online.... You can sort of kludge this by accessing it with
op101a.inf+text+0
GBU v1.06 has some display problems.(Fixed... due to multi-toc bug)
Any Hlp/Inf file that relies on IBM Ext ASCII is in trouble. Hacks included from 0.6 onward to handle line diagrams.

Later, Peter Childs

INTERNET: pjchilds@apanix.apana.org.au

FIDONET : Peter Childs 3:800/352 (South Australian Country Club)