Category : BBS Programs+Doors
Archive   : ORA121.ZIP
Filename : READ.ME

Orator Off Line Reader for Windows 3.1
Copyright (c) 1992,1993
Nick Dyer
EvaWare UK
No 5 Grosvenor Court
Louth
Lincolnshire LN11 9LT
UNITED KINGDOM

******* NOTE EVAWARE BBS NOW AVAILABLE ***************************

BBS: int+44-507-608645 FidoNet 2:252/158
UseNet/Internet: [email protected] until Fri 3 Sept 1993
UseNet/Internet: [email protected] From Fri 3 Sept 1993 onwards

******************************************************************



INSTALLATION
------------
**********************************
EXISTING USERS SHOULD NOT
MERELY COPY THE ARCHIVES FILES
INTO THEIR ORATOR PROGRAM
DIRECTORY. READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS
CAREFULLY.
***********************************
1) Orator no longer requires that NDX files be in the QWK packet from
V1.12 onwards, these will be created by Orator when opening the
QWK packet.

2) Avoid using EMM386 in your Config.SYS. Microsoft themselves
advise that one doesn't use EMM386 together with Windows as it
affects speed.

3) Ensure that you have ANSI.SYS configured in your Config.SYS. At
the moment the ANSIVIEWER does not have an internal ANSI
interpreter.

4) Copy all the files in this archive into a temporary install
directory.

5) Note that you must have VBRUN300.DLL in your \WIndows\SYSTEM
directory.

6) Start Windows and from the Program Manager (or File Manager)
choose Run from the File menu. Type a:Setup (Or drive and path to
temporary installation directory). Setup will then proceed to
install Orator for you.
This procedure is the same for existing users merely upgrading.

7) On the first time you start Orator it will run the Configuration
routine and then return you to the Program Manager. Subsequent
starts of Orator will actually run the Reader it is only the first
time that runs the configuration routine.


HISTORY
-------


Pre Ver 1.13 history removed.

V1.13
-----

9) Orator recompiled under Visual Basic 2.0 so 30-40 % faster program
load and considerable program execution speed improvement.

10) Orator no longer 'complains' so much about users having EMM386
in their config.sys. It is still however advised by Microsoft that
you don't run EMM386.SYS if you are running Windows. I found it
makes certain routines twice as slow as normal.

11) Linkage to Archivers is changed so that in theory you should be able to run a Windows archiver as long as it supports command line
hooks telling it archive names to be opened and the path where the
files extracted should be placed.

12) Configuration option to bolt on a third party spell checker.
Allows you to spell check your replies. You need a Third Party
Spell Checker.

13) There is now a check option to force Orator to search for an Email
address when replying to Usenet Private mail.

Selecting the check box is the same as setting the reply to Usenet

Gateway, in that Orator knows that it must then scan the message
being replied to for the Email address. This amendment was
necessary as boards running Ed Hoppers UUPCB did not require
private Email to be addressed to Usenet Gateway and so Orator did
not necessarily search the message for an email address.

14) Reply Editor now has fields to remind the user of who they are
sending mail to and whether it is private or not. There is also
a field to remind the user of which conference they are currently
messaging in.

15) The Scroll Bar in the message reading form has been moved to the
left hand side of the screen to make reading easier. It was
considered awkward when reading to have the NEXT button on the
left but the Scroll bar on the right.

16) The NEXT and PREV buttons on the message reading form have been
redesigned and two new buttons have been added to allow the reader
to hop forward and back through conferences.



Ver 1.14
---------

17) 09:30 27/02/93
The new Prev/Next Buttons for conferences in Ver1.13 didn't
disable when entering List mode, causing the user to fall out of
the program when selecting these buttons. These buttons are now
correctly disabled in the List function.

18) 10:01 27/02/93
Introduction of new Email address list maintenance routine allows

the user to archive Email and Fido net addresses.

19) 07:02 01/03/93
Patch File ORA114p.zip released as complaints about the new on-line
Email address directory having too shorter fields. The fieds now
have no limit.

20) 17:09 06/04/93
Bill Edwards reported problem with Fido tags resulting in no tag at
all. This fixed. Thank you Bill.

21) 17:20 26/04/93
When message is comment from Sysop to be replied to Orator now
correctly selects private mail on reply. This reported by Karl
Brendal.

22) 18:58 26/04/93
A facility added to the configuration screen to allow users to
decide for themselves whether they wish to have the Prev/Next
buttons and Scroll bar in the Message reading form situated on
the left or the right of the page. Some users would prefer the
scroll bar to be in the more normal windows position on the right.

Ver 1.15beta upto 1.21
-----------------------

23) 07:29 05/05/93
Quoting improved so does not lose ends of lines when replying.

24) 07:51 21/05/93
Quoting now working efficiently

25) 07:51 22/05/93
Found bug when handling certain CAM-Mail packets and Rosemail
Problem interpreting CONTROL.DAT, causing Board details to be
scrambled IE BBSID replaced with Date of scan etc.

26) 16:29 06/06/93
Added Conference profile system to allow user to define which
conferences are Fido style, Netmail, Email and QWK II/Pcboard
ver 15.0 style etc.

27) 22:33 06/06/93
Added Conference Message Subject sorting to allow reading messages
in thread order.

28) 21:39 15/06/93
For some obscure reason, certain Rosemail doors were appending loads
of blank records to the end of the messages.dat file which was
giving Orator a real headache. Anyway, Orator is now told to
abort processing the packet any further than the first 'dud' record.


29) 17:20 22/06/93
Added Hotkey functions to give:

F5=PrevMessage
F6=Next Message
F7=Prev Conference
F8=Next Conference
F9=Reply to Message
F10=Save message
F11=Print message

30) 07:50 30/06/93
Added a warning to tell operator when the .REP was older than the
current packet being opened. IE Old replies that may already have
been uploaded to the BBS.

31) 20:35 12/07/93
Added bookmark facility and it finally works!

32) 20:35 12/07/93
When selecting List, in a conference, it now hops to the message
in the list you are currently reading.

33) 19:37 09/08/93
Last minute insertion of cut and paste commands in the internal
editor. These were always there, but never from a menu. Less
experienced Windows users would have been excused for not even
being aware that these functions existed.

34) 18:24 23/08/93
Added colour facility. Allows user tod efine colours for
Message text and reply text foregrounds and backgrounds.
Also added a new Viewport for messages that allows viewing
of messages in colour so that quoted text can be shown in
another colour. Removed ORATCTL4.VBX from system. Not needed now.

35) 21:31 24/08/93
Removed all ORATCTL?.VBX files as no longer necessary. VB 3.0 not
compatible with them. Note VBRUN300.DLL now necessary for Orator.

36) 16:35 25/08/93
As I was forced to redesign a lot of the screen layouts with the
a lot of the 3d effects not being compatible with Ver 3 of VB I
decided to add a few new controls. 2 new ones on the message
reading page. One to dump messages from a conference to a file,
and then second to write a whole message or just a selected part
of it to a file. Great for cutting up UUENCODED stuff and also
for automating the stealing of taglines out of the middle of
messages.

37) 09:45 26/08/93
The addition of colour in message texts has lead to dramatic slow
down in the speed of displaying a message and scrolling of the msg.
To speed things up, the whole of the Message reading screen has
been redesigned. One major difference is the scroll bar has been
scrapped and the message viewport expanded to increase its size.
This means more of the message is shown on both a horizontal
basis and a vertical basis. I have replaced the Scroll bar with
prev/next page buttons that make speedy page change possible.
I have also added F3 for prev page and F4 as next page hotkeys.

There are bound to be those that do not like the new layout, but
I was forced to do this as the VB ver 3.0 compiler did not like
the custom controls I was using for the previous layout and then
the addition of the colour in Message text would have made the
reader just too slow for people to tolerate.

38) 15:29 26/08/93
Added another facility to mark text in a message and write it to
a file. This facility also has a button to allow selected text to
be written direct to the tagline file. This means taglines can be
marked en masse in a message and with one key depression written
to the system tagline file. Good eh!?

39) 20:08 29/08/93
Added the facility to attach a file to a reply. Simplifies the
sending of UUENCODED stuff.

40) 21:53 29/08/93
Right! thats it. No more for this version. Last minute stuff, to
allow the dumping of multiple messages from a conference to a file.
The order the messages are selected becomes the order they appear in
the file so that UUENCODED stuff can be written in the correct order
to the file. Now Orator has to be one of the best equipped readers
around especially for those who mess with InterNet a lot.


Known Bugs
----------

1) Problems reading messages from Major BBS systems


Work goes on...... 🙂

Regards
Nick Dyer
EvaWare UK