QWK.doc This documentation goes together with QWK, copyright © 1992 by Bob Blaylock You may use this program for 30 days for evaluation purposes. After 30 days, if you continue using it, you are required to send $10 to: Bob Blaylock 580 Pintura Drive Santa Barbara, California, 93111 This program may be distributed freely, subject to the following conditions: The accompanying documentation file, QWK.doc, must be distributed with it. This program may not, under any circumstances, be uploaded to, or distributed by, Compuserve Information services. I, Bob Blaylock, claim the exclusive right to control the distribution and use of this program. No copyrights other than mine may be claimed on this program, either by itself, or as part of a collective work, and no restrictions may be placed upon the distribution of this program by anyone other than myself. The latest version of this program will always be available on the Bowhead Whale BBS, at (805)964-UNIX, in the Macintosh: room. I can be contacted for bug reports, suggestions, etc., as ³Bob Blaylock² on the Bowhead Whale BBS. To send me private messages, just enter them there in the Mail> room. I can also be contacted at these other addresses: America OnLine: TheBob GEnie: B.BLAYLOCK InterNet: TheBob@aol.com You can, of course, also send me old-fashioned mail at the above postal address. Anyway, QWK is a simple offline message reader. Many BBSes allow you the option, instead of reading messages while you are logged in, typing up the phone lines, and (in the case of long-distance calls) racking up phone charges, of having all your new messages gathered into a .QWK packet, which you then download, and read offline. There are a wide host of .QWK readers for MS-DOS machines, but very few for the Macintosh. The only other one I know of is Freddie, which I was never able to get to work on my system. Freddie seems to be 32-bit dirty. I refuse to cripple my machine by running it in 24-bit addressing mode, so, if I wanted to read .QWK packets, the only solution seemed to be to write my own reader. The first version of this was written as a generic C program, which could be compiled and run on just about any platform, really. It used Think C's console package to let the user select the input and output files for a program that, on most other platforms, would be run as a filter, more like this: QWK MESSAGES.TXT This new version, which now also has an actual version number (1.01) implements a more proper Macintosh-type user interface. Anyway, I suppose now you want me to tell you how to use this program, right? Well, to start with, you need to download a .QWK packet from your BBS. This procedure varies greatly from one BBS to another; if you can't figure it out, you'll have to ask your sysop for help. In every instance I have seen so far, the .QWK packets have arrived compressed with PKZIP. You will, therefore, need an unZIPping program to run on your Macintosh. I know of several. StuffIt Deluxe, includes an UnZIPper. There are also a number of minor shareware and freeware programs out there. Names I know of are Zip, unZip, and ZipOp. You should be able to find one of these, at least, on a BBS near you, probably from the same place you downloaded QWK. Anyway, make sure that whatever unZIPper you use, you have it configured so that it does not attempt to strip linefeeds, or otherwise convert the files it extracts. You will find that a .QWK packet contains a large number of files. The two files that QWK wants are called ³MESSAGES.DAT² and ³CONTROL.DAT². CONTROL.DAT is optional; QWK uses it to build a list of the conference names. If QWK doesn't find CONTROL.DAT, it will still process the MESSAGES.DAT file correctly, but you will only see the numbers, not the names of the conferences in which the messages are found. If the BBS from which you obtained the .QWK packet has a really large number of conferences, you might want to omit the CONTROL.DAT file, as it does take some time to process it and build the conference list. Now that you have the MESSAGES.DAT, and possibly the CONTROL.DAT files extracted, you're ready to run QWK. When you run it, you'll be presented right away with a dialog, containing copyright information, a picture of me, and the instruction to select the MESSAGES.DAT file at the next dialog. Clicking almost anywhere in this dialog will dismiss it, and present you with the standard SFGetFile() dialog. At this point, use this dialog to select the MESSAGES.DAT file from the .QWK packet you want to read. (Actually, the program currently discards the selected file name, and only uses the directory selected by this dialog. If you select any file that is in the same directory as the MESSAGES.DAT file, it will look there for a file named ³MESSAGES.DAT², and also for one in the same directory named ³CONTROL.DAT². I may change this in the future, but for now, this way seemed to make sense to me.) Next, you'll be presented with another dialog, which asks you how to deal with IBM-specific characters, and what Creator signature to assign to the converted message file. You are given three options for dealing with IBM-specific characters. The first is to leave them as they are. If you have an IBM-compatible font that you can use to view the converted messages, then this is the best option. In fact, I've decided to include just such a font in the archive I'm going to use to distribute this program. The second is to attempt to convert as many of them as possible to the corresponding Macintosh characters. There are, however, many IBM-specific characters that have no corresponding Macintosh characters. The small text field at the end of the third option specifies a character to use in place of those characters which cannot be otherwise converted. The third option is to convert all IBM-specific characters to the character entered into the small text field. The other thing this dialog asks you for is the Creator signature to give the converted message file. This currently defaults to Œttxt¹, which is the signature for TeachText. This means that when you double-click on the converted message file, TeachText will be invoked as the standard program to view it with. If you have a different text editor program that you wish to use, you may enter the Creator signature for that program in this space. Some known signatures are: Œttxt¹ TeachText ŒEdit¹ Consulair's Edit program, or the newer clone, Edit II ŒRich¹ BBEdit ŒMSWD¹ MicroSoft Word ŒMACA¹ MacWrite ŒKAHL¹ Think C Once you've dismissed this dialog, you'll get a standard SFPutFile() dialog, asking you where to save the converted message text I'm not sure what there is to say about this that isn't obvious. You simply use this to tell QWK where to save the converted messages. After you dismiss this final dialog, you'll be presented with a simple window telling you that the program's doing its thing. How long it takes may vary greatly, depending on the size the of the packet, and how fast a machine you have. When it's finished, the program will quietly exit back to the Finder. At this point, if you look where you told it to save teh output, you'll find a text file. Reading this text file, you'll find first my copyright notice again, and then the text of all the messages in the packet. What I usually do at this point is to load this file into one window on a text editor, and scroll through the messages, reading them. In another window, into another file, I enter all the messages I want to send back to the BBS. When I am finished, I go back into my terminal program, log back into the BBS, and individually enter my replies, copying them from the text editor, and pasting them out my modem. Anyone out there have documentation on the format of .REP packets? I'd like to write a similar program to this one, to convert my replies into a .REP packet, for easier uploading back into the BBS. If anyone out there has such documentation, I'd very much appreciate having a copy send to me at one of the addresses that appears near the beginning of this file.