This patch cannot work properly while virus detection software is running. Please make sure that you have disabled any virus detectors before applying the patch.
About this patch
This patch works on the program “NewsWatcher 2.15” only, and makes it as follows. See also Limitations.
• Enables to read and write articles or messages in Japanese Kanji characters.
• Properly Wraps and Unwraps the paragraphs including Kanji characters.
Also you can change the fill column width when posting the messages.
• Disables the Latin-1 (ISO8859-1 character set) conversion
on 8-bit characters, which was added newly to 2.xx versions.
The original “NewsWatcher 2.15” program and the related files are located at the following anonymous FTP sites;
<ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/>
Or, you may obtain the latest version of NewsWatcher program from the Info-Mac archive sites.
System requirements and Setting
To run the patched NewsWatcher program properly with displaying Kanji characters in the article and message windows, the following conditions or steps are required;
1. Running KanjiTalk 7, a Japanese localized version of System 7, or equivalent systems such as with Apple’s Japanese Language Kit.
2. Being Kanji fonts, say “Osaka”, installed in the “Font” folder of the system.
3. Then, set the Kanji font name in the “Screen Fonts” field of the preferences dialog.
The preferences file “NewsWatcher Prefs” is fully compatible between the two versions of NewsWatcher program, the original and the patched ones. So, you can arbitrarily switch the NewsWatcher program among these at any time.
Extra handlings for Kanji strings
• Wrap and Unwrap the paragraphs including Kanji characters properly
On wrapping the paragraphs, the potential break points are now at the boundaries of Roman words (original), and at any position in the Kanji strings.
Some punctuations or right braces will follow the Kanji strings, instead of coming to the beginning of the next line.
If you press the Option-key when wrapping, the “Set Fill Column” dialog will appear and then you can change the paragraph width in columns. Default width is 74. The Option key is valid for the commands “Wrap”, “Paste as Quote”, and “Send Message”.
On UnWrapping the paragraphs, the separate lines are concatenated with one blank character for adjacent Roman words (original), or no blanks for Kanji strings.
• No extra spaces are added in front of or behind the Kanji string when the word was pasted by a drag & drop operation in the message window.
Limitations
• This patch converts the JIS Kanji and Base64 MIME coding, not covers the EUC Kanji code or the entire MIME specifications. The patch understands the “=?iso-2022-jp?b?...?=” sequence in the messages, just only for the MIME coding of Base64. For the support of non-Roman languages and MIME, please see the Appendix G “Wish List” section of the original User Document.
• For the technical difficulties and my wish to minimize the patch, I have decided to rather kill the Latin-1 conversion than to live together with 8-bit Kanji and non-US characters. Sorry, some people might suffer from this drawback.
Revison history
• 2.15+jp1, published on December 16, 1996
- The first patch release.
Bug reports
The NewsWatcher is now released in a final version, and is still discussed hot at the internet newsgroup of comp.sys.mac.comm. If you have got some errors, please just examine what is the cause of them. It is a good idea to ask the question to the public newsgroup. If you have any question or suggestion, please feel free to contact me via e-mail;
<mailto:mizutori@ai.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
<mailto:mizutori@po.iijnet.or.jp>
You can obtain the latest versions of my software at the following WWW page;
