I'm pleased to announce the release of Pronews/2 v1.56
Pronews/2 is a multithreaded NNTP Newsreader program for OS/2. This release completely reworks the character set and codepage support code within Pronews/2 and allows support for new character sets to be added reasonably easily.
If you are upgrading from a release prior to 1.54 then you are strongly urged to backup your existing filter files as the files have a different on-disk format from 1.54 onwards. Failure to backup files *.FLT in pronews and pronewsheaders will mean it will be impossible to use your filters if you should need to revert to a release prior to 1.54. You should also read the readme.txt file installed in the pronews directory as this covers changes and new features from prior releases as well as tips for making Pronews/2 quicker.
You can find Pronews/2 1.56 on ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/incoming (later to be ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/apps/internet/news/reader) as pn2v156.zip.
Pronews/2 is shareware and all profits from its sale are donated to the charity Save the Children.
New features and important changes
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Pronews/2 1.56 adds support for posting and reading articles in UTF-8. Existing article bodies encoded in UTF-8 should appear correctly in 1.56 but existing headers containing UTF-8 within subject or composer fields will require a group reload in order to be translated correctly.
A new file, pronews.env, can be used to set Pronews specific environment variables rather than having to code them in config.sys. A sample version of pronews.env is supplied as sample.env and will need to be copied/renamed before it is used.
New environment variable, PNLOGDIR, can be used to specify a directory where Pronews should keep its log files.
Pronews will now base64 encode any subject or composer name that contains non-ASCII characters if base64 encoding is specified on the Codepage tab in the group or global settings notebooks.
There are 3 new files added to the pronews directory with this release. All have the extension *.pn and are required for Pronews/2 1.56 to operate. All have to do with the new charset/codepage support. Pronews/2 1.56 will refuse to start if any of these files are missing.
-- Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK Trevor-Hemsley at dsl dot pipex dot com
Source: OS2VOICE