On  1 Jun 97 at 11:01, Dougal Beilby wrote:

I would suspect that gzip is a much better compression utility for
text than 
pkzip although I cannot corroborate this.  
 
Anyone want to comment on this ?
 

I'm not sure about the compression of gzip vs zip, but I believe gzip is
better for text, not to mention much more convienient, at least on UNIX
sytems.  UNIX systems have this great little utility called zmore, which
is a text viewer which automaticaly ungzip's the text file and displays
it.  Which means you can keep all your text files compressed, and still
be able to display them in one step.

I sent a post about this previously, but it hasn't shown up on the 
list yet.  Basically, the compression ratios for PKZIP and GZIP are 
virtually identical.
 

My question is, does anybody have a windows text browser/viewer that
understands gzip? (and can handle the lack of line feed characters).
I've been looking for one for a while so that I can view the gzip'd
files from the archive directly without having to uncompress them.

No need to, actually.  At least for the ftp.ubc.ca archives, you can 
simply specify the filename of the file, minus the .gz extension, and 
the server will un-gzip the file before sending it.  Here's the 
process I use for reading fics on the archive:

1.  Highlight the fic's filename by drag-clicking on it.

2.  Press Ctrl-C to copy the text to the clipboard.

3.  Double click on the location field somewhere after the URL, 
leaving the cursor at the end of the URL.

4.  Hit Ctrl-V to copy the filename to the field.

5.  Delete the '.gz' extension with the backspace key.

6.  Cursor to the beginning of the filename and delete the leading 
space.

7.  Hit Enter.  Voila!

Whew!  It's more complicated to explain than to actually do, though.

Alternatively, try the other archives at http://www.tass.org/fanfic/

These aren't gzipped at all - unfortunately, the server's rather 
slow.

I also dashed off an MS-DOS batch file for reading GZIPped text files 
all in one step if anybody's interested.  It uses the MS-DOS GZIP 
port and Vernon Buerg's text reader LIST.

- Sean Connor (connor@meena.cc.uregina.ca)

        "It jams." - Intel TV ad, referring to the Pentium chip.