The format of the HTML file is chosen to be readable and preserve as much of the original news entry as possible. The heading is taken from the '&' line. The text is placed within <pre> markers so that formatting is preserved. The footer contains a link to the first news entry, & Help, and a generation date. HTML 2.0 markers make the page black on a white background with red/purple new/old links respectively.
Users may want to edit the newsfile slightly before they run IMnews2html. '&' lines are now displayed, so should be capitalised. Entry names are only recognised if they match the entire entry name, and are not part of larger words or next to square or angular brackets, whereas MUSH 2.2 would recognise only enough of the entry name to be unique. 'news apps <name>, where <name> is one of 'scientist', 'unit', or 'monster'' will no longer work. There is, of course, no guarantee that links will be in-context: the sentence 'One set of aliens is called 'Daleks'' could produce a link to the entry on Osirian criminal 'Set'.
perl IMnews2html ~/mush/text/news.txtIt would produce a 'help.html' file thus:
help
Welcome to TinyMUSH 2.2's default news file. Here is some information which you might find useful: Code (last updated 1/9/95) Patchlevel (last updated 3/22/95) Writing News (last updated 1/7/95) Type 'news <topic name>' for more information about a given topic.[News Help]
Generated Fri Oct 6 0:36:29 BST 1995 by IMnews2html.prl v1.0 by Ian McDonald <type40@tardis.ed.ac.uk>
Last modified: Mon Oct 9 00:58:10 1995