Subject: Re: Shrinkit.Exe
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From: Jerry Kindall <kindall@mail.manual.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:26:36 -0400
Organization: Manual Labor
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In article <19990615150524.01902.00000120@ng-cd1.aol.com>, 
a2mg@aol.comNomail (TEXAS II - AppleWorks) wrote:

> The packing program was written by Jerry Kindall. The nice thing 
> about it is that you don't actually have to know how to Exec the file 
> to Exec it.  I am sure it must have already been done for GS Shrinkit 
> v1.1 by somebody.

The packing program is called XTRAX.  It doesn't produce a _true_ text 
file.  Only the first 256 bytes of the file, in fact, are text.  The 
rest of the file is binary.  The text-based header contains a short 
routine which loads the real extraction code from the next 768 bytes of 
the file.  That code then extracts the files in the archive.  The files 
are not compressed, but they're not ASCII-encoded either so they're much 
smaller than a Binscii file or the like.

Since it's not a real text file you should NOT post it on an FTP site 
with a filename ending in .TXT.  If you do, many FTP programs will think 
it really is a text file and convert all the linefeeds to carriage 
returns when you download it, which will ruin the binary part of it.  I 
suggest a filename ending in .XTX, although .EXE seems to have been used 
in ShrinkIt's case.  That's not a bad choice either because FTP programs 
will think it's a DOS/Windows executable and download it in binary mode, 
as they should.

I believe GS ShrinkIt has a resource fork.  XTRAX is an 8-bit program 
written mostly in BASIC and therefore can't put it into an archive.  The 
best strategy for distributing GS ShrinkIt is going to be as a disk 
image, as someone else suggested.  IIGS users will first need the 8-bit 
version of ShrinkIt to unpack that.

I do not have a copy of XTRAX anymore, but I know where I can get one 
and will let everyone know when I have one available for download.

-- 
Jerry Kindall  <mailto:kindall@mail.manual.com>  Technical Writing, etc.
Manual Labor   <http://www.manual.com/>               We Wrote the Book!