TERMINAL EMULATION Kermit's VT320/340 emulator lacks the following features: . Smooth scroll . Downloadable soft fonts . ReGis graphics (VT340/330) . Dual sessions in split screens (VT340/330) . Local screen editing and block transmission (for security reasons) . True double height/width characters (these are simulated) . Selective erasure (as a character attribute, a formatted screen item) . Some of the exotic and rarely-used features of the DEC VT340/330 series: formatted screen and graphics operations highly specialized to DEC hardware. MS-DOS Kermit does not include "ANSI" or "PCTERM" emulation. If you need this, as when logging in to a PC-based BBS, make sure you have the ANSI.SYS (part of DOS) console driver loaded, and then tell MS-DOS Kermit to SET TERMINAL TYPE NONE, SET PARITY NONE, and SET TERMINAL BYTESIZE 8, and make sure your PC's code page agrees with what the BBS thinks it is, otherwise box-drawing characters might come out looking like accented letters. Since Kermit's own terminal emulator is not active when your terminal type is NONE, the mode line, screen rollback, similar features are not available. On certain "national keyboards", like the German one, Kermit's normal escape character, Ctrl-] (Control-Rightbracket) does not seem work. This is because certain control characters are typed differently on these keyboards. On the German keyboard, Ctrl-] is produced by holding down the Ctrl (Strg) key and pressing the + (plus) key. MS-DOS Kermit has no way of knowing this, and continues to display the escape character as "^]" in the mode-line help text. Kermit does not work with certain Swedish keyboard drivers because of a bug in the keyboard driver. Workaround: use a different keyboard driver. Reportedy there are several different Swedish keyboard drivers available. Do not attempt to plug an "enhanced" (101) keyboard into a PC/XT or earlier. The BIOS on early PCs does not support the newer keyboards, even if you install the corresponding keyboard driver. If VAX/VMS thinks you have a VT220 or VT320, it sends 8-bit control sequences. Kermit does not understand them unless you SET TERMINAL BYTESIZE 8. The symptom is the appearance of fragments of escape sequences on the screen and wrong cursor positioning, and possibly fractured tab settings, particularly during EVE sessions. You can prevent VMS from sending 8-bit control sequences (if you really do not have an 8-bit connection) by giving the VMS command SET TERMINAL /NOEIGHT. For VAX/VMS, you should also use Xon/Xoff flow control in both directions (SET TERM /TTSYNC /HOSTSYNC on VMS). In VT100/200/300 emulation on the IBM PC family, receipt of ESC [ 4 m (turn on underscore) results in a color change rather than underscore on IBM CGA, EGA and other color displays. IBM display adapters have one less attribute than DEC monochrome terminals, and in addition the two systems intensify dots differently (IBM does foreground/character dots only, whereas DEC can illuminate any dot). SET TERMINAL COLOR 1 [3xx 4xx] (used to make the foreground color bright), if issued when SET TERMINAL SCREEN REVERSE is in effect, reverts to normal video. Similary, if SET TERMINAL COLOR 1 is in effect, the effects of the host- generated escape sequences CSI 1 m and CSI 0 m are reversed. If certain incomplete escape sequences (e.g. Operating System Command) are received during terminal emulation, Kermit can hang waiting for the string terminator that never comes, usually because of noise on the communication line. Reset the terminal emulator by pressing Alt-= (Alt-equals), the default key for \Kreset. Kermit assumes 25 screen lines but can adapt to other lengths if it knows how to get this information from the video adapter. There still might be some confusion about screen length when switching between text and graphics modes, or between 80 and 132 column mode, or escaping back from CONNECT mode, due primarily to lack of reliable or consistent information from the many different kinds of video adapters. To get properly formatted screens during terminal emulation, be sure to inform the remote host of your screen width and length. So that key translation and macros can work on both IBM and non-IBM compatible PCs, Kermit uses the system BIOS to obtain key scan codes. But the IBM BIOS does not produce scan codes at all for certain keys, and may produce duplicate scan codes for others. Num Lock, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause are examples. When you PUSH to DOS (including when you use Kermit's RUN command), and you have XON/XOFF flow control enabled, Kermit sends an XOFF (Ctrl-S) to the host when you leave, and XON (Ctrl-Q) when you return (if you have RTS/CTS flow control enabled, Kermit turns off RTS). This prevents data transmitted by the host from being lost. However, if you are using Xon/Xoff and you do this while using the EMACS text editor on the host, the Ctrl-S will be interpreted as a Search command, and the Ctrl-Q as a Quote command. When you return to EMACS, type several Ctrl-G's to get back to normal. Similar comments about sending Xoff and Xon apply when Kermit is commanded to change its screen size between 80 and 132 columns. Session logging can be turned on using the LOG SESSION command, and it can be toggled on and off during terminal emulation by using whatever keys are associated with the verbs \Klogoff and \Klogon. One user stated the requirement to enable a session log, but to have it initially turned off. This can be done as follows (using the F1 and F2 keys as examples): SET KEY \315 {\Kloginit} ; F1 to turn on log SET KEY \316 \klogoff ; F2 to turn log off DEFINE loginit log session, set key \315 \klogon, define loginit, connect To log your session to a printer, add the word PRN after "log session" in the third line above. The session log is written to disk by DOS. The frequency with which DOS updates this file is governed by the BUFFERS= line in your CONFIG.SYS file (see your DOS manual). If you allocate a large number of buffers in CONFIG.SYS, disk operations occur infrequently and this improves performance. If you need to have the session log updated more frequently to minimize the loss of data when there is a power failure, you can do this (at the expense of efficiency) by allocating a smaller number of buffers in CONFIG.SYS. .