In the course of newsgroup surfing, you may find yourself wanting to access some of the pictures uploaded to the various newsgroups. Since binary programs cannot be stored in a newsgroup, they must be encoded into ascii text for transmission. This means you need to decode them if you wish to view them. To start you will need several programs to set up your decoding scheme. Do this first and you will always have it. Go to the Public Download Area 'gpda' and look under the Apple II & GS compression and conversion files. Look for 'BinSCII', 'GSCII+', 'UU-Decode/Encode', 'ShrinkIt' and 'PMPUnzip v2.0'. Download these files to your computer and use BinSCII to create and decode GSCII+, ShrinkIT and UU-Decode. Use 'ShrinkIt' to create 'PMPUnzip v2.0'. Download a good viewing program from 'viewers' in which to see the picture when you're done. Now go to your files directory (gfiles) and enter 'News'. From there, type gnews and go to the newsgroup with the pictures. Press 's' for save and name each file you want. It will ask you if you want a filetype added to the end, to this answer 'no'. For multi-part files, save them as the same name and the system will ask you if you want to append the file (add the parts together). Answer 'y' for yes. When you get a file or files, quit the newsreader and you'll be back in the 'News' directory. Tag each file (if more than one), press 'f', '3', [ENTER/Return], 'd'. This will zip the files up to save time and space for downloading to your computer. Save the resulting 'zipped' file to 'News/filename.zip. Use your left arrow key to return to your tagged files. Type 'r' and 'y' to remove the tagged files as you no longer need them. Highlight the new zip file and press 'd' for download and send them to your computer. Use 'PMPUnzip v2.0' to unzip your file once you've downloaded it. Try to use ZModem if you can because it works better, is automatic and if you get cut off in the middle of a transfer, it will pick up where it left off via ZModem Resume/Crash Recovery. Set this to 'automatic' in your comm program's options. Once you're ready, type 'UUdecode xxxxx.xxx (whatever filename) and it will create a GIF, JPeg, MPeg or .UUE program. If it's .UUE, you'll need to decode it a second time as sometimes they double encode files, if they're adult material. If it's MPeg (Motion Picture Engineering Group), you're going to need a lot of memory in your computer because these are actually mini-movies. JPegs (Joint Picture Engineering Group) are the most common and display the most quality but many viewing programs have difficulty with them. GIFs were the most common until JPeg came along. CompuServe, which owns the GIF format, recently slapped a duty on all GIF creating software and the world has moved towards JPeg. Apple GIFs are in BinSCII format, GS computers can use GSCII+ to decode. GIFs can be viewed with 'GIFView' or 'IIGIF'. Some files are zipped besides encoded so you will need to use the PMPUnzip program as well. Use 'JPeGS v1.0' to view JPegs. Apple's GSCII+ is an NDA accessible from the menu bar with a simple click. ShrinkIT is an easy program with fully automatic functions.