Re: How to reconstitute Computist posts?

[Greg Buchner <apple22@mn.rr.com>]

In article <pan.2005.05.15.19.57.51.579994@emeraldcity.gov>,
 The Wizard of Oz <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:

> If you take a look at the posts directly you will see they are all in 7
> bit ASCII. In simple terms all the characters you can type in at the
> keyboard minus the control characters and the extended characters you can
> get with the alt key and keypad. Depending on the computer you are using
> there may be a couple of additional characters like the vbar and backtick.
> There was a program for the Apple// called Binscii which did pretty much
> the same thing. Which is to say they all took a file consisting of bytes
> (8 bits) and converted them to standard ASCII (7 bits). Uuencode did a
> straight conversion. I think Binscii had some error checking. Finally yenc
> added compression. The merits of compression can be good in some cases
> (eg. raw data) or bad in others (eg. already compressed files).
> Compressing a compressed file ends up with a larger file than the original
> in 99% of all cases.

I don't believe yEnc does any compression.  What yEnc does is take 
advantage of the fact that most news servers can handle 8-bit data and 
that you can transfer binaries that way except for a few characters such 
as linefeed and CR, which have to be 'escaped' out.  This leads to 
generally only a 3-5% increase in file size as opposed to the uuencode 
33% increase in file size.

An encoding scheme that does incorporate (simple) compression is binhex.  
Files can be made smaller under that format but it's fairly rare as it 
just uses a simple RLE compression method.

I do a test, but the news reader I'm currently using will extract yEnc 
postings, but doesn't seem to post in yEnc.  And there's a few programs 
that will decode yEnc on the Mac OS X end, but I didn't find any that 
would encode and let me test.

There is a proposed extension to yEnc which incorporates it into MIME 
with compression added.  It's called gZip-8Bit but from the www.yenc.org 
page it doesn't look like anythings been done with it in a while.

Greg B.

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