HP Eloquence A.06.20 / Release Notes

Support for character mode programs on the Windows platform

HP Eloquence A.06.20 provides support for character mode programs on the Windows platform. This includes the HP Eloquence QUERY application and FORMs utilities which have been modified for the Windows platform.

While dialog based programs are preferable, it may not be economic to convert all existing or custom tailored software to dialogs. Support for character mode programs will allow easier porting of existing HP Eloquence programs to the Windows platform.

New Functionality

When eloqcore is executed locally, it now supports character I/O using the Win32 console window. This means that character oriented programs such as HP Eloquence QUERY can be executed on the local system.
HP Eloquence QUERY along with the FORMs utility programs (MFORM, CFORM, PFORM) have been ported to work on the Windows platform.

Limitations

The CATALOG statement is not supported in the Windows platform. Possible workaround:

    IF SYSID$("s") = "WIN32" THEN
       COMMAND "!dir ..."
    ELSE
       CATALOG ...
    END IF

The CRTCOLS= statement is not implemented yet, an error 880 is returned.
The blinking and underline video attributes are represented with text colors. This is necessary since the Windows console does not support blinking and underlined text.
Configuration of text colors is currently not supported. Normal text is displayed black on white background. The Windows console window normally starts up with a black background which can cause undesired flicker when eloqcore switches the background to white. To overcome this, a shortcut to eloqcore.exe should be created where the color preferences can be modified to black text on white background.
Besides this, the font style and size can also be customized if a shortcut to eloqcore.exe has been created.
Character I/O does only work if eloqcore is executed on the local system. It is not possible to execute eloqcore on a remote Windows machine and redirect character I/O to the local system.
On the Windows 9x platform, it is currently not possible to terminate eloqcore by clicking the 'close' button of the eloqcore window or the equivalent 'close' window menu item. To terminate eloqcore, the QUIT statement must be issued.
This does not apply on the Windows NT platform.

Code Page Mapping

On Windows NT, eloqcore switches the console code page to PC-850 Multilingual. This ensures that most of the HP Roman 8 national and line drawing character codes can be mapped.

However, on Windows 9x, this is not possible. Instead, the current console code page (which is set by means of the 'mode' command, e.g. in the autoexec.bat system startup file) is used to select an appropriate map file. Currently, the following map files are included:

cp850.map PC-850 Multilingual (Windows 9x and NT)

cp437.map PC-8 (Windows 9x, less national characters)

cp1252.map ISO 8859-1 (Windows 9x, no line drawing characters)

These files are located in the etc subdirectory of your HP Eloquence installation directory which is usually

  C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Eloquence.

They define how system-specific character codes are translated from/to HP Roman 8 which is used internally by eloqcore. Since these are plain ASCII files, it is possible to define additional mappings yourself if necessary. For example, if your console uses the 1250 code page (which can be queried with the 'mode' command) so you would need support for the 1250 code page, you could copy the cp1252.map file to cp1250.map and change the mapping wherever code page 1250 differs from code page 1252.

Installation notes

After installation, you should create a shortcut for HP Eloquence on your Windows desktop. This should point to the new HP Eloquence executable, usually C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Eloquence\bin\eloqcore.exe.

In order to make use of HP Eloquence QUERY and the example programs, you should further add the SYSTEM and EXAMPLE volume definitions to your eloq.config file. To do that, either use the HP Eloquence Configuration Utility or edit the eloq.config file using a text editor (it is located in the etc subdirectory of your HP Eloquence installation directory):

VOLUME SYSTEM   "C:/Program Files/Hewlett-Packard/HP Eloquence/share/prog"
VOLUME EXAMPLE  "C:/Program Files/Hewlett-Packard/HP Eloquence/share/example"

cp850.map	PC-850 Multilingual (Windows 9x and NT)
cp437.map	PC-8 (Windows 9x, less national characters)
cp1252.map	ISO 8859-1 (Windows 9x, no line drawing characters)