Fw: C-Kermit 7.0 Beta.10 Ready for Testing

["Alexander Voropay" <a.voropay@globalone.ru>]

 Надо попробовать...


-----Original Message-----
From: Frank da Cruz <fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu>
Newsgroups:
comp.protocols.kermit.misc,comp.std.internat,comp.sys.hp.hpux,comp.unix.sola
ris,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.aix,comp.os.qnx,comp.os.vms,comp.os.aos
Date: 12 сентября 1999 г. 0:16
Subject: C-Kermit 7.0 Beta.10 Ready for Testing



C-Kermit 7.0 Beta.10 for UNIX, VMS, Plan 9, and AOS/VS is ready for
testing (other platforms should follow later):

  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ck70.html

The main addition since Beta.09 (and hopefully the last major
addition before the final release) is Unicode support.

For those who haven't heard of it, Unicode (ISO 10646) is the new
Universal Character Set (UCS), which represents most of the world's
scripts (Roman, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, etc) in a single (more-or-less) "flat" 16-bit encoding.  To
learn more about Unicode, visit:

  http://www.unicode.org/

Kermit protocol and software have included character-set
translation capabilities since the 1980s, allowing conversion of
text among the many "traditional" character sets like the ISO 8859
Latin Alphabets, PC code pages, IBM mainframe EBCDIC code pages,
ISO 646 national character sets, KOI sets, JIS sets, and assorted
proprietary sets (DEC, DG, Apple, NeXT, etc).

With growing acceptance of Unicode, there is increasing need for
importation of text in "traditional" encodings into Unicode platforms
or applications, and to a lesser degree for export of Unicode text to
non-Unicode environments.  C-Kermit now offers these services over a
wide range of platforms and communication methods.

. UCS-2 and UTF-8 are now supported as transfer character sets
   (the small number of international standard character sets
   allowed "on the wire" in Kermit file transfer; each Kermit
   file-transfer partner converts between its local encoding
   and the transfer encoding) (UCS-2 and UTF-8 are two
   different representations of Unicode / ISO 10646).

. UCS-2 and UTF-8 are now supported as file character sets.
   Incoming text can be stored in either UTF-8 or UCS-2, and
   UCS-2 or UTF-8 text can be sent with conversion to any
   appropriate transfer character set (including conversion of
   UCS-2 to UTF-8 or vice-versa).

. C-Kermit's TRANSLATE command can be used to convert
   traditional files to UCS-2 or UTF-8 (and, to the degree
   possible, vice versa) on the local computer, as well as
   between UCS-2 and UTF-8.

. C-Kermit can conduct UTF-8 terminal sessions, even when its
   local character set is not Unicode.  (It is also programmed
   to do the reverse -- i.e. make connections from a UTF-8
   console or Window to a non-Unicode host, but this has not
   been tested yet.)

. C-Kermit's TRANSMIT command can perform "ASCII" (nonprotocol)
   uploads of text files, converting them to UTF-8 on the fly.
   Or it can upload UTF-8 or UCS-2, converting it to some other
   set, etc etc.

(Obviously whenever translating from Unicode to a smaller set,
Unicode characters that are not in the smaller set are lost, just
like when converting from, say, Latin-1 to German ISO 646.)

C-Kermit 7.0 Beta.10 is available at:

  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ck70.html

The Web page lists all the other new features since the previous
release, 6.0, in September 1996.  Beta.10 should be the last, or
maybe next to last, test version before the final 7.0 release.  It
has already been built successfully on more than 130 different
platforms (prebuilt binaries are available and are listed at the end
of the Web page; if you can built others, please let me know).  Until
a new edition of the C-Kermit manual is published, the new features
of version 7.0 are documented in the (plain text) ckermit2.txt file;
Section 6.6 describes the new Unicode features.

Please send any questions or report any problems to:

  kermit-support@columbia.edu

Thanks!

Frank da Cruz
The Kermit Project
Columbia University

P.S. This announcement was originally posted nearly a week ago but
never seemed to get out to the newsgroups.  My apologies if you are
seeing it twice!