jstools version 1998.11.04

This is a suite of applications, and some libraries they share.
The most interesting application is multi-mode editor with support
for WYSIWYG generation of HTML and PostScript, among other goodies.
There are also a number of small graphical utilities intended to be used
from within shell scripts or window-manager configuration files.

The libraries are intended to be general-purpose, so the distribution 
may be of interest to Tcl and/or Tk programmers as well as people 
who want to use the applications.

I am currently in the process of converting the libraries from old-style 
autoloaded procedures to modern Tcl packages (using namespaces and 
"package require").  Currently, the natural-language database (message 
catalogue) support and the option-parsing support have been packagized; 
the rest is still autoloaded.  While this process is going on, jstools 
will be changing rather a lot from release to release, and I'll be 
breaking APIs left and right.  For this reason, I'm temporarily switching 
to numbering releases by date, since a major.minor version numbering 
scheme doesn't make much sense.  I may well also take this chance 
to make some other incompatible changes, e.g. in file formats.  When 
all the libraries have been packagized, the APIs will settle down 
and I'll go back to a more normal version numbering scheme.  Also, 
for this period releases will be a bit more rough than normal - for 
instance, the documentation may not be completely in synch with the 
code.

This release requires at least Tcl/Tk 8.0.  (It may run under 8.1 
as well, but hasn't been thoroughly tested there.)  It runs with full 
functionality under Unix, and most features of jedit at least also 
work under Windows.  (I'd be interested to hear if it works on Macs.)

This is the twelfth release of several wish-based applications:

  jabbrevs - an abbreviation manager (used by jedit)
  jbrowser - a configurable directory browser
  jdoc - a hypertext help viewer
  jedit - an extensible multi-mode text editor
  jmore - a multi-window file viewer
  jprefs - a preferences panel

and some tools intended to be used from shell scripts, window manager
configuration files, etc:

  jalert - display an alert panel
  jcolname - prompt for a colour name
  jcolrgb - prompt for a colour by RGB values
  jconfirm - ask user for confirmation
  jfs - allow user to select a file
  jprompt - ask user to supply a string

All come with extensive documentation, accessible through the jdoc 
command and also translated into HTML.

There are also a number of libraries, which you can use in your own
applications.  These are described in the file
"jstools-tk8.0v4.6.LIBRARIES".

The jstools distribution also contains pre-release, unsupported, or
otherwise not-ready-for-prime-time copies of:

  jcalendar - a rudimentary appointment calender, (marginally) useful
    for printing pretty month-long calendars with your appointments from
    `xcal' or `xcalendar'
  jlaunchpad - a menu of applications and remote hosts,
    similar to SGI's toolchest (broken under Tk 4.0 and later)
  jldbed - tool for editing natural language databases
  jmsgs - a graphical analogue to the Berkeley msgs(1) command
  jpeople - an address-list and email alias manager
  jperson - a command-line interface to the jpeople database
  jtail - an application that displays its standard input progressively 
    (like piping something into tail -f)

This release no longer includes the old jbrowser application; 
I recommend Christian Bolik's TkDesk, described at
http://people.mainz.netsurf.de/~bolik/tkdesk/ instead.

You must have Tcl and the Tk toolkit installed in order to use these
applications.

Jay Sekora
<js@aq.org>
1998.11.04