Newsgroups: alt.binaries.pictures.d,alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.d,alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d,alt.sex.pictures.d,news.answers,alt.answers Path: news1.ucsd.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!equalizer!timbuk.cray.com!news3.mr.net!mr.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!nntp.cadence.com!deej From: deej@cadence.com (Jim Howard) Subject: alt.binaries.pictures FAQ - General info Message-ID: <1995Jul10.013019@UB40.Cadence.COM> Followup-To: alt.binaries.pictures.d Sender: news@Cadence.COM Supersedes: <1995Jun26.013016@UB40.Cadence.COM> Organization: Cadence Design System, Inc. References: <1995Jul10.013001@UB40.Cadence.COM> Date: Mon, 10 Jul 1995 08:30:23 GMT Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 00:00:00 GMT Lines: 580 Xref: news1.ucsd.edu alt.binaries.pictures.d:17155 alt.binaries.pictures.fine-art.d:211 alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d:5011 alt.sex.pictures.d:77 news.answers:41265 alt.answers:6685 Archive-name: pictures-faq/part2 Last-modified: 05 March 1993 This is part 2 of the FAQ for the alt.binaries.pictures* hierarchy. This part of the alt.binaries.pictures FAQ contains "general", or operating-system independent information. It answers (hopefully) all the questions you may have about the pictures newsgroups, decoding and encoding techniques, and picture formats. For information on issues of etiquette and posting policy and/or suggestions, consult part 1 of this posting. For information on your particular system and on specific utilities, consult part 3 of this posting. Before posting to these groups for the first time, please check the FAQ list (this posting - including parts 2 and 3), and also read the newsgroup news.announce.newusers, which contains many answers to questions about UseNet in general. If you've read previous versions of this FAQ, you'll probably only want to read anything that has changed since the last distribution. These changes appear both in this document and in the accompanying "Changes to the alt.binaries.pictures FAQ". Note that this is a "live" document, and is always getting important information added or updated. *********************************************************************** This file is intended to be a general introduction to the pictures newsgroups, answering some common questions concerning pictures posted in those newsgroups, namely how to decode and view them. It is not, of course, possible to cover everything, but I will try to to get as much as I can into this file. If you feel something important has been omitted and you know the subject well, please write me so I can include the info for future releases. E-mail should be sent to deej@cadence.com for these purposes. Before you miss an important detail contained in this file, let me "pre-repeat" that many of the programs mentioned in this document are available for anonymous ftp at bongo.cc.utexas.edu (128.83.186.13), in the gifstuff directory. Also: there are NO GIF files of any kind at this site! Save your time and don't bother looking for them! OK... on to the real reason you're reading this document... TABLE OF CONTENTS I. ABOUT THIS FAQ II. DOWNLOADING AND DECODING FILES III. COMMON PICTURE TYPES IV. ENCODING AND UPLOADING FILES V. ALTERNATE SOURCES FOR PICTURES/HOW-TO'S OF FTP VI. COMMON PROBLEMS VII. COPYRIGHT I. ABOUT THIS FAQ This FAQ is posted every other Monday to the alt.binaries.pictures newsgroups and to news.answers. It is also available by anonymous FTP, from UUCP, or through e-mail by using the services available from a couple of mail servers. For anonymous FTP access, you can look on either pit-manager.mit.edu [18.72.1.58] in /pub/usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq in files "part1.Z", "part2.Z", or "part3.Z", on ftp.cs.ruu.nl [131.211.80.17] in /pub/NEWS.ANSWERS/pictures-faq for "part1", "part2", or "part3", on ftp.uu.net [137.39.1.2, 137.39.1.9, or 192.48.96.2] in /usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq as the files "part1.Z", "part2.Z", or "part3.Z". You can get the FAQ via UUCP by retrieving the appropriate part from "uunet!/archive/usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part1", "uunet!/archive/usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part2", or "uunet!/archive/usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part3". For e-mail access, send a message to mail-server@pit-manager.mit.edu with the mail body "send usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part1" to get the first part, "send usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part2" for the second, and "send usenet/news.answers/pictures-faq/part3" for the third, or e-mail to mail-server@cs.ruu.nl with "send NEWS.ANSWERS/pictures-faq/part1", "send NEWS.ANSWERS/pictures-faq/part2", and/or "send NEWS.ANSWERS/pictures-faq/part3" in the body of the message. II. DOWNLOADING AND DECODING FILES Basic checklist: Alternate checklist: ---------------- -------------------- News reader News reader (optional in some cases) Text file editor "Super-decoder" UUDECODEr By far the most common method of posting files to the pictures newsgroups is the UUENCODE standard. This program, shipped standard with most implementations of UNIX, converts binary files into plain-text ASCII files which can be handled by the mail system. You will need a version of UUDECODE before anything else in order to view anything downloaded from the net. If your system does not have a version of UUDECODE available, you can get one via anonymous ftp from bongo.cc.utexas.edu, in the gifstuff/uutools directory. The format of a uuencoded file consists of an optional "table specification", which consists of the word "table" alone on a line, followed by one or more lines containing the characters that will be used in the remaining encoded data. Following this, the standard requires the line containing only the text "begin " (where "" is a three-character numeric string, and "" notes the name of the decoded file - for example "begin 640 myfile.gif"). This "begin" line is then followed by several lines of approximately 61 characters, all beginning with a capital "M", and containing any non-lower-case printing character (and very rarely resembles anything but absolute gibberish). Optionally, one to two lines may be blank or contain less than the normal number of characters if those lines are immediately before the line containing the "end" notation (in this case, these shorter lines will NOT begin with "M"). The "end" text alone on a line marks the conclusion of the uuencoded data. Any information that does not fit into the above classifications are termed as either "headers" or "trailers", and are not intended to be included in the information to be decoded. For example, the following represents a valid uuencoded file (although it contains no useful information - don't bother decoding it!): begin 666 bogus.file .