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Disclaimer
This software is copyrighted by the author, Martin Goebbel. It may be used and distributed freely without any restrictions.
This software is provided "as is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantibility and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the author be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

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Why this program has been written
Actually there were two reasons for this:
So the main Design Goals where to
The second point was accomplished by using only BIOS Video routines for output. This should make it work under standard Dos, Dos/V, DesqView and it should work more easily with Screen Readers.
It should also work on a computer without a 100% compatible CGA video adapter and on a dos emulator (not tested). The drawback is that it is slow on older machines. I tried it on a computer with 8086, 4.77MHz. It did work, but don't expect blazing speed there.

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How to use it
Usage is actually pretty simple. On the Commanline type:
HLIST document.htm

If there is no filename supplied, hlist starts in filter mode. This means the HTML document is read from standard input and the (hopefully) readable text goes to the standard output. For example:
TYPE INDEX.HTM | HLIST | MORE
This would allow you to view the HTML Document using the DOS More command.
In order to create a readable text file from a HTML File use hlist like this:
TYPE INDEX.HTM | HLIST > INDEX.TXT

After the Document has been parsed, you can scroll by a single line using the cursor up and down keys. For a full page use the page up and down keys. Home and End will take you to the start of the document or to its end.
The Cursor Left Key will reload the previous document. Actually this just scrolls through the history list (which may be selected by pressing Alt-H) by making the previous document the current and moving the current document to the end of the list.
Alt-P starts printing the current Document on LPT1.
The only Control Codes used for printing are ESC-E and ESC-F to turn bold printing on and off. This should work on almost all Printers.
If it does not work on your Printer, look in your Printer Manual if there is a way to make it compatible to an Epson printer.

Emphasized and Bold characters are displayed in black, links are displayed in blue. If running in a Desqview Window you might get different colors.
To move from link to link, use the Tabulator. Shift and Tab move to the previous link, tab without shift to the next link.
The Enter key loads the document specified by the link. You may only use local or relative links (This program is not a full Web Browser )
Something like <A HREF="http://www.some-where.org/index.html"> is not understood.
But <A HREF="C:\HTML\INDEX.HTM"> or <A HREF="..\HDOC\MAIN.HTM#label"> should work.

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System Requirements
The minimal system requirements are
A warning about speed: A minimal system like the one described above needs about half a minute for parsing a 50K HTML file. So, if nothing seems to happen after starting the program, it's not necessarily a program crash. Just wait a while.
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Bugs and missing things
Like usual there are probably tons of Bugs I did't find yet.
One additional thing to say is that the program supports only a subset of HTML 2.0 AND is very strict about the syntax. I have only included the tags I felt to be necessary for writing the documentation for my programs (See Reasons above, point 1 ).
For a HTML file to be correctly parsed it needs the <HTML>, <HEAD>, </HEAD>, <BODY>, </BODY>, </HTML> tags to exist within the document (case is not significant). A <TITLE> tag is only recognized within a header.
Currently the following tags and special symbols are ( more or less ) supported:
Tags (not case sensitive)

Special Symbols
  1. &,<,>,¦, ,£,¥,"
  2. ª,«,°,±,µ,¶,º,×
  3. »,½,¼,¡,¿,÷,¢
  4. Ä,ä,Ü,ü,Ö,ö,ß
  5. ÿ,à,é,â,å,ê
  6. ë,è,ï,î,ì,Å
  7. É,Æ,ô,ò,û,ù
  8. á,í,ó,ú,ñ,Ñ

I have only implemented those symbols which can be found in Codepage 437. This means that if you have a different Codepage selected you might have problems reading the symbols above.
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How to contact the Author
You may reach me by email under one of the following adresses:

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