Subject: New software release - HZ 2.0

From: [email-masked] (Fung Fung Lee)
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 05:11:47 GMT

This is a software release announcement - HZ 2.0

  The HZ package 2.0 contains the following major changes:

  hz2gb 2.0, zw2hz 2.0

  It also includes the HZ standard document itself as a .hz file.
  This file also demonstrates how the escape sequences are encoded.

  The new utilities are now available on the ftp site "ahkcus.org" as
  (ftp as user anonymous with no need of a password)
  ahkcus.org: src/unix/HZ-2.0.tar.Z

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  hz2gb 2.0: convert a HZ file to a GB (HGB/SGB) file

  The HZ specification does not dictate how to convert invalid HZ files,
  just as the definition of a programming language usually does not specify
  how a compiler should handle illegal programming constructs.
  The error recovery procedure of this HZ decoder was designed after
  examination of the conversion errors reported by hz2gb 1.1 of some of the
  "HZ" files posted on the news group alt.chinese.text.  I suspected that 
  most of the errors occured due to improper manual insertion of escape
  sequences, and/or using invalid GB codes, such as those for "space" ($2121).
  Such errors should not have occured if the files were first properly edited
  as GB codes, and then converted by an HZ encoder, such as gb2hz (preferably
  with the -t option.)

  To prevent some hanzi displayers from ill behaviour, the output stream
  should be or should be corrected to be valid mixed ASCII and GB sequences.

  The error recovery procedure is by no means unique, and may change in the
  future. Users should NOT regard the error recovery features as part of the
  HZ specification. 

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  zw2hz 2.0: do a straightforward conversion from a zW file into a HZ file

  This version was an update of version 1.1, because the specification of
  zW had been changed by the original authors.

  Since the set of all zW files is a proper subset of the set of all
  HZ (HGB) files, it is always possible to do perfect translation from
  zW to HZ (HGB); but not vice versa. 
  * HGB - High-bit-set GB, as used in CCDOS, Macintosh System 6.0.x and later.

  As for error handling, I took the lazy approach. For example, if the
  original zW file contains invalid GB codes, they will also show up in
  the output HZ file, and can be detected by "hz2gb -v".

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Fung Fung Lee 李枫峰