Re: archiving

[jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Morris Krok wrote:

>   What archiving program one must use to send a Xywrite program with all
> the embedded commands intact through the internet.

I'm assuming that you meant "program" (as in XPL routine) rather than a
formatted document. Any decent archiving program should do, the Zipfile
archive format being one of the most common, at least in the U.S. Out of the
Zip archiver/de-archiver programs, PKZip (with versions available for most of
the operating systems in use) might be the most common standard. There is
also the freeware InfoZip, generally compatible with PK. WINZip is just for
Windows, and has a more proprietary format -- i.e., someone using one of the
others might well not be able to open an archive made by WinZip.

There is another potential issue that I think has to do with 7-bit vs. 8-bit
communication streams. In such cases, an executable file or an archive must
additionally be encoded with Mime, UU, or XX encoding, and passed through the
appropriate decoder at the other end. For example, I know this has often been
necessary for transmitting such files through the mail gateway on Compuserve.
I don't know exactly what is going on in this type of situation -- not really
my area -- but it seems to be a less frequently encountered problem these
days. Someone else here can probably fill in the blanks on that one.

In regard to transmitting a heavily formatted Xy-document intact, what I've
said about archiving still holds. However, there is an alternate method of
changing all the *live* guillemots (embedded formatting triangles) into
ordinary, inactive, displayable chevrons at this end, and then using another
Xy-routine at the other end to change them back. This would make the file
transmittable as 100% pure-ASCII text. The real advantage of the archive is
that it can contain multiple files, and it will error-check on decompression,
revealing if there was any file corruption in transit.

Jordan