ABE

Information taken from documentation, dated 16 June, 1989.

This is the GEMDOS variant of Brad Templeton's ABE Encoder/Decoder.

ABE is a replacement for uuencode/uudecode designed to deal with all the typical problems of USENET transmission, along with those of other media.

Advantages are:

• Files are often smaller, and compress well.
• All printable characters map to themselves, so strings in binaries are readable right in the encoding.
• All lines are indexed, so sort(1) can repair any random scrambling of lines or files. (This can be turned off).
• Extraneous lines (news headers, comments, signatures etc.) are ignored, even in the middle of encodings.
• A PD tiny decoder is available to include with files for first time users.
• Files can be split up automatically into equal sized blocks.
• Blocks can contain redundant information so that the decoder can handle blocks in any order, even with reposted duplicates and extraneous articles.
• Files with blank regions can be constructed from multi-part encodings with damaged blocks.
• Multiple files can be placed in one encoding.
• The decoder is extremely general and configurable, and supports many features not currently found in the encoder, but which other encoder writers might find useful.

The ABE encoder (and decoder) support 3 different encoding formats. One uses all 94 printable ASCII characters, the other avoids characters that have trouble in ASCII-EBDIC translations, and the 3rd is the UUENCODE format. (ABE can make files decodable by a typical uudecode program.)

Name: Adrian Rezus [GEMDOS version]
Email: adriaan@wn2.sci.kun.nl Attempting to verify this email address.