A1.2. dataComet Release Notes 4.6b1 - 4.6 _____________________________________________________________________________ dataComet documentation (Rev. 5/6/00): Copyright 1997 databeast, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This document has information on (select and use "Find..." to go to the section): Known Bugs in the current version Release Notes: 4.6 4.6fc2 4.6fc1 4.6b7 4.6b6 4.6b5 4.6b4 4.6b3 4.6b2 4.6b1 Note that with version 4.6, release numbering has been changed to better conform with Apple's standard release numbering system. ___________________________________________________ 4.6 Final Release 5/20/99 ___________________________________________________ Features: * Wyse-60 function key mapping has been added to the "Host menus and function keys" popup menu. Bug Fixes: * Modified the printing routines for better compatibility with the LaserWriter 8.6 driver (in accordance with Apple Technote #1161, 4/19/99), so that the driver is notified that dataComet correctly handles variant Print Record sizes. This may fix occasional crashes which have been observed when using LaserWriter 8.6. In addition, the printing routines now guarantee that the page number is placed within the visible print page (a problem which could result in printing extra pages with some versions of the Epson print drivers). * Fixed 3270 Pen Detection to handle Space and Null field responses correctly, so that an 0x7E AID is transmitted with SBAs for modified fields and no data. * Fixed the TFTP server so that it works on PowerPC machines, and added receive file processing so received files can have their file type set from Internet Config and can be launched automatically, and MacBinary and BinHex files can be decoded automatically. * Added support for the "[Png" escape sequence to the ANSI emulator, which is used by some PC-ANSI host applications to display a character from the alternate graphics font. (Note that this usage conflicts directly with the ANSI specification, which reserves this escape sequence for the Tab Clear command: only when Pn > 5 will characters be displayed, otherwise the sequence is assumed to be a valid Tab Clear command.) ___________________________________________________ 4.6fc2 4/26/99 ___________________________________________________ Bug Fixes: * Fixed a crash on 68K machines caused by an uninitialized variable being referenced when no session had been opened and an alternate terminal type was selected in the "New..." dialog and the dialog subsequently OK'ed. * The VT100 graphics characters now appear correctly when the Comet PC-ANSI font is selected even when the PC-ANSI terminal type has not been selected. * The ANSI/VT100 emulator now handles SCO-ANSI color selection escape sequences correctly, and ignores other commands which use "[=" as an introducer so they will not leave garbage from incomplete commands on the display screen. See "1.1. VT100 Command Set" for details. * Added a "Background Color Erase" option in the "Color..." dialog so that background color erase can be disabled. * The selection is now reset after a Control-Click invokes the Contextual Menu Manager and a selection has been made. * The Paste command now automatically applies text translation from the Macintosh character set to the host character set when host output translation is selected, so that Copy and Paste using Comet Mona and other Macintosh fonts works seamlessly; formerly you needed to hold down the Shift key to select translation when pasting. Shift-Paste now forces translation (which does not occur when output translation is turned off, e.g., when Comet ISO-Latin-1 is selected), and Option-Paste now suppresses translation. 3279 bug fixes - Fixed handling of extended stream Write Structured Field packets with "zero" length so that the actual packet length is always used and set properly. - Fixed a bug which in certain unusual circumstances triggered the FT3270 file transfer routines, causing valid PF key commands to be ignored. - Fixed a bug which sometimes caused 3279 attribute bytes to appear with an extended attribute (such as underline) set. - Fixed a bug which caused intermittent reporting of normal characters as APL characters; this occurred in the 3279 emulator when extended reply mode was not selected and a Read Buffer All command was received. - Fixed a crash which occurred when a 3270 session was closed, was also paged backwards in the scrollback buffer, and dataComet was Quit. The crash was caused by referencing 3270 memory resources which had already been released. ___________________________________________________ 4.6fc1 4/13/99 ___________________________________________________ Features: * dataComet now supports dialup and other serial connections using Modem and Serial ports added with PowerBook, NuBus, and PCI cards or internal Macintosh modem hardware (as with the iMac). These can be selected from the Serial port list in the "New..." dialog. Bug Fixes: * Macro bug fixes and enhancements: - Global macros are now processed when no windows are open. - The "dataComet Launch macro" can now be used to execute any macro commands, rather than being limited to executing security configuration commands for Public Kiosk configurations. - Window changes now cause macro commands to be moved to new context, so that recorded macros work in a natural way. Note that if you are currently using macros to open new sessions, you may need to add "!W}" to the macros after the open if the macros include subsequent commands (which were executed in the current window context, and would now execute in the new window's context). - Edit window keystrokes are now recorded when "Record actions for macro" is on. - The state of the menu macro Shift and Option keys are now reset correctly when interpreting macros. Menu items with Shift-Option variants can now be recorded and executed in macros ("CapsLock-Shift-Option" is now required to generate a disable-item macro command when recording). - Fixed a bug which caused a crash when a global macro was deleted and the frontmost window had no macros defined. * FT3270 IBM mainframe file transfer bug fixes and enhancements: - FT3270 downloads now work correctly in the PowerPC version; there was an error in checksum calculations in the C code used with the PowerPC. - FT3270 now supports automatic download BinHex/MacBinary translation and launching of downloaded documents. - FT3270 uploads no longer fail when an 0xFF character is contained in the data. * The "Control Keypad" dialog item "VT220 named FKeys sent without Shift key down" is now set properly (this bug was introduced in 4.6b7). * The standard VT220 function key definitions used when the "Automatic" Host Menus and Function Keys option is selected now send "OT" when F5 is pressed rather than "[15~" so the host Print function works correctly with the default definition. * Font scaling is only enabled when printing to help avoid ugly font scaling in emulator display screens (this problem was introduced by printing fix included in 4.6b7). ___________________________________________________ 4.6b7 3/22/99 ___________________________________________________ Features: * A number of new Mac <-> 3270 Translation tables have been added to support international applications. * The "Comet Default" preferences document is now located in the "dataComet Preferences" Folder in the System "Preferences" Folder. User "Documents" and "Sessions" folders are also now located in the "dataComet Preferences" folder, to make upgrading dataComet versions easier and provide compatibility with MacOS X Server's NetBoot capabilities. * Option-"Open Log..." now selects a file to log all session data transmissions for debugging purposes; this option will provide reliable logs even in cases where crashes occur! * The VT100/ANSI emulation has a number of improvements and bug fixes: - Background Color Erase is now supported, so that erased areas are set to the current background color. - A number of new VT320/ISO-6429/ECMA-48 command sequences are now supported by the emulator: 8-bit control transmission (S7C1T/S8C1T), Erase Char (ECH), Protected-Areas (SPA), DEC Protected-Areas (DECSCA), Send/Receive mode (SRM), Visible/Invisible Cursor (DECTCEM), Character-Position-Absolute (HPA), Cursor-Back-Tab (CBT), Cursor-Character-Absolute (CHA), Cursor-Horizontal-Index (CHT), Line-Position-Absolute (VPA), Next-Line (CNL), Previous-Line (CPL), Repeat (REP), Pan/Scroll-Down (SD), Pan/Scroll-Left (SL), Pan/Scroll-Right (SR), and Pan/Scroll-Up (SU). See "1.1. VT100 Command Set" for the sequences used to invoke these commands. - New function key mapping options have been added for ANSI emulators in the "Host menus and function keys" popup menu, which now appears in the "Control ASCII Emulator..." dialog as well as the "New..." dialog. (This makes it easier to select function key mappings appropriate for connections to hosts using linux, scoansi, xterm, and at386 terminal types. This option replaces the "Select IBM menus and keymapping" option in the "Control Emulator..." dialog and the "NCSA FKey mapping" option in the "Control Keypad..." dialog.) Function key options have also been expanded so that 72 function keys can be easily selected: When you press a key or function key button, pressing Shift shifts up 12, pressing Control shifts up 24, and pressing Option sends functions associated with the "Home" and other middle-pad function keys. The shifted state is now promptly reflected by the labels on the function button names on the left hand side of the emulator screen which are displayed when you press the '?'/'M' button. NOTE that "Command-button" is now used to set button macros rather than "Option-button", and "Command-macro menu" sets menu macros rather than "Option-menu". Also, the "Home" and other middle-pad keys are now mapped in a more "natural" fashion: See "0.1. Shortcuts", which has been updated to reflect these changes in function key mapping. - The VT100/ANSI emulator now supports Set Graphics Rendition (SGR) commands to set the default foreground (black, "[39m") and background (white, "[49m") colors. - ESC and SGR commands which are used to select the PC-ANSI alternate characters were also added. "" remaps the next character for display when it is greater than 159, where 160 -> 127, 161-191 -> 1-31, and 192-223 -> 128-159. "[10m" selects the default font, "[11m" allows display of the alternate font characters in positions 0-31, and "[12m" selects the alternate font and displays shifts the character into the high range (128-255). Bug fixes: * Setting the terminal type when first creating a "New..." session no longer results in a crash (this bug was introduced with the improved color maps support added in 4.6b6, and was caused by a premature attempt to select the window's screen graphics device when it had not yet been identified). * PC-ANSI graphics characters less than 32 now display properly (this bug was introduced with support for the 3270 extended attributes). * 3279 emulation bug fixes: - The 3270 now sends only Start Field orders (rather than Start Field Extended) when extended reply mode has not selected by the host. This caused problems with the RDRLIST command failing to execute keyed commands. - The 3270 Repeat to Address order now uses the APL translate table to translate characters when the alternate APL character set has been selected using a Set Attribute order; failure to do so was causing some characters to appear incorrectly. - 3270 fields with extended attributes selected are now drawn correctly when they appear at the end of a line immediately after a field which also had extended attributes (rather than using the attributes associated with the previous field). * Printing fixes: - Printing a selection in emulator windows sometimes resulted in a crash during recalculation of the character width table... this is now done after the Print Driver is closed to avoid this problem. - Printing text windows using monospaced fonts now places words so that they always have a space after the previous word. - The Comet fonts are now scaled so that when they are printed they are larger and more legible. - Page range selections made in the "Print..." dialog now work correctly. - Fonts have been uniformly updated to use a slashed zero (0) rather than a dotted zero, since the dotted zero could be confused with an eight. The new slashed zero is slashed at the bottom to avoid confusion with the slash-oh character (¯), which is slashed in the middle. ___________________________________________________ 4.6b6 2/3/99 ___________________________________________________ Features: * The IBM 3279 now supports background colors, the Graphics Escape command, and the APL character set. NOTE that you may need to update the color mapping in the "Color..." dialog using the "Default Colors" button to get correct background colors for color 3279 sessions created using earlier versions of dataComet 4.6! * Session Keepalive and "Reopen session automatically on failure" options have been added to the "Control Session" dialog. * File Transfer: An "AutoDecode" option has been added to control BinHex and MacBinary decoding of downloaded files. Files containing multiple binhexes (e.g., mailboxes) now download OK, and all binhexes unpack correctly. * When using VT100/VT220/PC-ANSI emulation the buttons on the left side of the screen now send VT220 Function keys by default rather than VT100 application keypad commands; you can send the VT220 "Find" and other special keys using F1 through F4 and F23 and F24 (see "0.1. Shortcuts"). This makes it easier to use dataComet with the new standard Macintosh keyboards, which lack these keys. In VT100 -> IBM key mode the buttons will send the default IBM PF key sequences. Bug fixes: * The IBM 3279 now handles 2-byte long extended stream packets which claim to be of "zero" length correctly rather than crashing. * In some circumstances the first 3279 screen would be filled with junk characters due to failure to set the NULL character variable before screen initialization occurred. This problem has been fixed. * IBM 3270 invisible fields now remain hidden on printed output. * The IBM 3270 PF1 and PF3 key combinations (Control-7 and Control-9) have been fixed; these were broken when Control-attribute options were added in 4.6b1. * The IBM 3279 now sends the NULL query reply correctly. * Long session names are now truncated uniformly; variation between the document name and the name in the menu was causing .edit save failures when names were longer than 25 characters. * The "lines in scrollback buffer" in the "Control Session" dialog has been fixed so that it works correctly. * The correct alert text is now presented when you launch dataComet, option-key remapping is selected, and the "dataComet Keyboard" was not installed; the text said "Receive" rather giving the instructions for installing the resource. * Improper placement of the emulator window when the window was placed close to the top of the screen on an alternate monitor and the status bar was not displayed has been fixed; the text window now zooms correctly when located on an alternate monitor. * Text windows are now positioned below the emulator window by default when the screen is large enough to allow this placement. * The default print font size is now 10, and the default QuickDraw left margin is now 72 pixels (1 inch) to give best results printing with Courier; the font size menu now includes all font sizes to make it easier to select alternate print font sizes when the current display font does not offer all font sizes. The default text window zoom size is now 512 pixels so the text has an optimal width when printing with the default settings. * Several minor problems with color map settings have been fixed; the color map is now always set correctly on session open without an additional screen update event (e.g., a window selection), the background screen color is always set correctly without an update, and the VT100 always inherits a VT100 color map (rather than a PC-ANSI color map) * Fixed the Apple Menu so a disabled line is added between the dataComet items and other Apple Menu items when the Appearance Manager is not present. ___________________________________________________ 4.6b5 12/22/98 ___________________________________________________ Bug fixes: * The IBM 3279 Character Set response to a Read Partition-Query command has been fixed so that TSO & ISPF will no longer crash with a divide by zero error (TSO was dividing by the "character set descriptor length" parameter, which as reported by dataComet contained an invalid value of zero). * 3279 underscore and reverse extended attributes are no longer drawn in field attribute bytes. * A bug in the 68K implementation of the 3279 which caused bad output to be sent to the host has been fixed. (This was introduced when 14-bit address support was added in 4.6b3.) * VT100 graphics characters now display correctly when Fast Drawing mode is used. * A rare VT100 drawing glitch was fixed; this bug caused extra spaces to be added after zero-width characters from a proportional font were drawn. ___________________________________________________ 4.6b4 12/17/98 ___________________________________________________ Bug fixes: * The 3270 emulator now includes a Summary reply in its response to a Read Partition-Query command. The omission of this field in the response was causing problems with some IBM host applications. * The VT100 emulator has been fixed so that VT100 graphics characters included in packets with less than 20 characters now display correctly when a Macintosh font is used (this bug did not appear when using the Comet ISO-Latin-1 or Comet DEC-Multinational fonts or when the graphics characters were included in larger data packets). * The 5250 key mode now sends the default keys supported by the AS/400 for VT100 emulation when ANSI/VT emulation is selected. A bug which caused a dataComet to hang when the IBM Clear key or menu item was selected when using ANSI/VT emulation was also fixed. ___________________________________________________ 4.6b3 12/11/98 ___________________________________________________ Features: * An "Alt. ID" field has been added to the "New..."/"Reconfigure Session..." dialog to allow entry of an alternate Telnet Terminal Type. * "Disable fallback to 24 X 80 screen" has been added to the "Control Emulator" dialog for the 3270. This option allows you to disable host-selected fallback to the 24 X 80 default screen size from larger screen sizes, so the contents of the scrollback buffer can be preserved in cases where the default screen size is only temporarily reset and not actually used. * Two icon flags have been added to the horizontal scrollbar indicator area: a lock icon has been added to show when encryption is on, and a printer icon has been added to show when VT100 passthru printing is on. Bug fixes: * 3279/Extended Stream bugs: * 3270 printing has been fixed to eliminate spurious attributes, which appeared as a result of changes in 4.6b1. * The Structured Field Erase/Reset command has been fixed. * The Read Modified All command is now supported. Due to this bug use of the PA1, PA2, and PA3 keys sometimes led to an X-Clock hang on some systems, requiring a local Reset. * 14-bit addresses are now enabled so that custom 3270 sizes > 4096 bytes will work correctly. * The buffer size is now reported properly in the Query Usable Area response; the 3270 was always reporting it as 1920 bytes, which caused some host systems to fail to use the full buffer for alternate sizes (even though the row and column sizes were reported correctly). * Under certain conditions the 3270 terminal was not automatically resized when it was re-opened after a new terminal size was selected in the "Control Emulator" dialog. It should now always be resized correctly when it is re-opened. The Row and Column options in the ANSI/VT100 Control Emulator dialog are now disabled to prevent resizing while the 3270 is active. * Pointers to the locked default color map resources are now stripped to 24 bits when running on pre-System-7 24-bit color systems to prevent address errors. * The "Control Color" dialog now saves old-style color maps if the "Host selects color" option is toggled; if the old map had not been modified, it was lost during the toggle (unless Command-. or Command-Z was used to Revert the color map to its previous settings). * Command-D now dismisses dialogs which have a "Don't Save" button. ___________________________________________________ 4.6b2 11/14/98 ___________________________________________________ Bug fixes: * Font settings are now saved when the "Comet Default" document is modified. * The Appearance Manager and Contextual Menu Manager interfaces are now incorporated into the code so Mac0S 7 launches work correctly if these extensions have not been installed. * The "Mac {} IBM_37USA+" character map is now fixed so NULL is mapped correctly to 0x00 (rather than 0x20) when "Send Imbedded 3270 Nulls as Blanks" is off. * A 3278 display bug introduced in 4.6b1 has been fixed; the bug caused the first field in a screen to sometimes be displayed with the wrong attribute. This bug did not affect 3279 displays. * The backspace key now works when an edit window is full. * Separate Color map resources are now used rather than saving the map in the 'CONF' resource so session colors saved separately on a per-termtype basis; colors are now updated immediately when they are modified so there is no need to use "Save Configuration..." to make them permanent. * The Help document on dialogs has been split into two parts. ___________________________________________________ 4.6b1 11/1/98 ___________________________________________________ Features: *** dataComet now includes Kerberos Authentication and Encryption support for all Telnet sessions using Telnet Plugins. *** dataComet's user interface has been improved: it now uses the Appearance Manager... and... * The "New..." dialog has been revised to use popup menu items, and includes Authenticate and Encrypt options to support Kerberos Telnet connections, with a new field which allows you to enter an alternate Kerberos User ID to log on to hosts for which you have a login name which differs from your Kerberos ID... and... * The configuration dialogs have been revised to make it easier to find and select configuration options; they now use Geneva 10 font, have a more logical arrangement of items and better wording for the option descriptions, and include a dialog bar which allows you to jump to the other configuration dialogs... and... * Contextual Menu support has been added to provide full compatibility with Apple Data Detectors and other Contextual Menu plugins. The Control-Click "Help" and "Send Selection" features previously implemented in dataComet are now listed in the Contextual Menu brought up by a Control-Click. Control-Clicking on text in an emulator or edit window now sends the selection if one has been made, rather than always sending the word which was clicked. *** dataComet now supports true IBM 3279 color screens and extended attribute processing (underline, reverse, and blink). The "IBM" menu and macros now include items which allow you to set the attribute for typed characters or the selection range. * Escape sequences used by SCO-ANSI emulations have been added to the VT100/VT220 emulator to make it possible to use dataComet's VT100 emulation with hosts which expect SCO terminals. *** "Comet Mona" and "Comet Mona Bold", a Comet font family which provides a fixed-width rendition of the standard Macintosh character set in sizes 8, 9, 12, and 16, are now the default fonts for new sessions; Courier 12 is now the default print font, so that printing will have the highest quality appearance, and good results can be obtained without installation of the Comet fonts in the System Fonts folder. The Comet ALA, PC-ANSI, ISO-Latin-1, and DEC-Multinational fonts are still included to make it possible to get perfect reproduction of host character sets. * All Comet fonts except "Comet ALA" and "Comet PC-ANSI" now include the "Euro" symbol, replacing the "International currency" symbol. * The default 3270 Mac <> IBM character mapping has been changed, and now supports all the characters in the IBM ISO-Latin-1 character set. Mappings have been added in the "IBM" menu for the "­" (DUP), " " (Field Mark), "..." (Record Separator) keys. * A "Selection Word Count..." dialog has been added to the "Edit -> Selection" menu, which can be opened using a new "#" control in edit windows. * "Erase EOF when pasting to clear previous contents" has been added to the 3270 Emulator dialog to improve paste functionality. This is now the default. Bug fixes: * A "Set dataComet Fegistration..." menu item has been added to the Apple menu to make the procedure for registering more obvious. * The addition of dynamic macro memory allocation in 4.5.2B made it possible to crash if all windows were closed, the last session closed had executed macros, and the next session opened executes macros. This bug has been fixed. * "Menu select" macro commands placed in the middle of a macro now now execute in their current place in the macro stream, rather than being appended to the end. E.g., inserting a "Return" using the "ASCII" menu now works as expected if it has been placed in the middle of a macro, rather than sending a Return after the rest of the macro has executed. * dataComet no longer sends a Telnet "WILL ECHO" response to request to "DO ECHO" from a host, since this confuses some telnet servers. * The Bold Font menu has been fixed so the selected bold font item is correctly noted when a new Font has been selected (this bug was introduced in disables ) * Color selection and inversion is now performed reliably on secondary monitors. * The VT100 emulator now preserves double width and height attributes when host color mapping is on. The "Use host color" option is now TRUE by default. * The default color mappings for both the VT100 and IBM3270 emulators have been improved so the default colors are nicer. The 3270 default attribute colors now match the standard defaults for the 3279 extended base color option. * Blink attributes now blink when viewing the scrollback buffer. * Toggling "Use Host Color" in the "Color" dialog now updates the background color in the frame surrounding the emulator drawing area. * The emulator drawing area clipping region has been changed to eliminate character overhangs which (infrequently) left garbage from oversize characters appearing on the right edge of the screen. * Download printing of files has been fixed so that it works correctly with print font selections (4.5.1 introduced a bug which made this feature work only when "Use Courier font for printing" was selected). Download printing now works with Z-Modem downloads. * Serial printing can now be resumed without closing the window after cancelling the serial print. * The edit window now avoids TextEdit "duplicate cursor" images which appeared when a single character selection (at the beginning of a line after a Return) was replaced with another character (or cleared). * Text copied in dataComet now pastes correctly into the Standard File dialog name field. * YMODEM downloads now work correctly. XMODEM uploads now display the progess indicator correctly. (Note that the download progress indicator does not show the progress, because XMODEM includes no information on the length of the file being downloaded). * Horizontal scrollbars now track correctly in the 68K version when the scrollbar thumb is used. _____________________________________________________________________________