GopherPup is an Internet information client program, usable
on the common computer systems including Macintosh, Motif/X
Windows and MS-Windows.  It provides an easy to use,
Macintosh Finder-like doorway to the range of Internet
Gopher services.

Release 0.2 adds support for Microsoft's Rich Text Format
(RTF) for display of fully formatted documents.  Formatting
can include a variety of fonts including symbols, font sizes
and styles, super-scripting and sub-scripting, tabbing,
paragraph formatting, and pictures in both vector and bitmap
forms.

It also adds network hypertext links as an extension of
Gopher+ protocol.  This permits documents to have hot-spots
that link to other documents or information services on the
network.

The new support for networked hyper-rich-text in GopherPup
makes it potentially quite useful for electronic publishing
of scientific documents.  These features are not found in
any other currently available, free network information
client.

This program supports Gopher+ methods, including ASK forms
that make it possible to provide client-server dialogs for
various information analyses, and supports multiple view
formats, so that you can fetch versions of documents that
most suit your computer system.

GopherPup is available at IUBio in ftp.bio.indiana.edu:
/util/gopher/gopherpup (via gopher or ftp).  An application
for viewing RTF documents, without network functions, called
RTFViewer is also released at this time (see
/util/dclap/apps/rtfviewer).

Also at this time IUBio archive is updated in places to
include network hyper-rich-text documents, especially the
FlyBase Drosophila databank.  It now includes a hyper-rich-
text doorway, and a hyper-rich-text searchable database of
Drosophila gene descriptions.  These are accessable at this
time only with GopherPup.

GopherPup is built on a cross-platform C toolkit from the
Nat'l Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI),
especially Jonathan Kans' Vibrant user interface toolkit.
On top of this toolkit, the author built a C++ application
framework that is patterned after the MacApp framework from
Apple Computer. This framework called DCLAP is available
freely to the public, as is NCBI's toolkit.  The home
archive location for DCLAP is {ftp,gopher} to
ftp.bio.indiana.edu:/util/dclap.

This initial release of GopherPup lacks several important
features, and also it includes several bugs, making it
likely to crash, and not yet suitable for extensive use.
There are application executables for Macintosh, MS-Windows,
and Sun Sparcstation, with a Silicon Graphics version
expected soon.  Source code is available, at the DCLAP home,
to those who wish to compile it on their own systems.

Comments, bug reports and suggestions for new features may
be addressed via e-mail to    GopherPup@Bio.Indiana.Edu
                                                            
                                               - Don Gilbert
                                        Bloomington, Indiana

History
 7 June 94, v 0.2.  Adds RichTextFormat, including PICT
pictures, and network hypertext features.
25 Jan 94, version -1 of GopherPup works on Mac and SunSparc-
Motif, but still incomplete compared to GopherApp.
 9 Nov 93, v 2.1bx of GopherApp (alias GopherApp++).
25 Mar 92, v 1.0 of GopherApp released to public.