HiliSoft RFC Browser

RFC Browser Family has following editions:

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Browse Colorful, Visual, Scalable Hyper-RFCs!

Large RFC required to read? Lots of RFCs required to read? RFC Browser is the tool you need.

RFC Browser is a viewer for browsing RFC documents as well as IETF drafts. It is an automatical and powerful utility to view RFCs that converts RFC plain texts into HyperRFCs: intra-RFC and inter-RFC hyperlinking, Colorful, Visual, Scalable.

Hyper: Most of original RFCs and IETF drafts are written in plain text format. Fortunately, RFC Browser provides an alternative way to view RFCs - rendering them into HyperRFCs! In RFC Browser, the RFC Index File and the RFCs look like html files, they own both intra-RFC and inter-RFC hyperlinks: RFC titles and RFC numbers in Index File, entries in Table of Contents, References and the quotations, URLs of author information (home page/E-Mail) and so on. RFCs are now more rich!

Colorful: Users can assign different fonts to RFC Title, Section Title, Table of Contents, Header/Footer, Author URL, RFC Anchor, and Default Text.

Visual: Furthermore, RFC Browser provides tree views to facilitate browsing: tree view of RFC/draft Indexing, tree view of document structure and tree view of pages.

Scalable: If users choose to hide Footers, Headers and blank lines after Footers and before Headers, the length of RFC will become shorter obviously! Small size of fonts also result in less printing paper.

Automatical: download RFC index or RFC documents automatically, and extract RFC documents from RFC collection automatically.

Powerful: If RFCs are your everyday readings, RFC Browser is the optimal explorer to assis you, as you need IE, Firefox, etc to browse web files.

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more...

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Features of Standard Edition:

1. Powerful parser that analyzes RFC Index File and most RFCs. It retrieves kinds of elements from RFCs and IETF drafts in text format: relations among RFCs, Table of Contents, References (including quotations and RFC anchors), Footers and Headers, pagination, and author's home page and E-Mail, etc.
2. Rich and friendly user interface: 4 views (RFC Manager and Index View for RFC Index File, Structure View and Page View for RFCs and IETF drafts), intra-RFC and inter-RFC hyperlink, color rendering of fonts, scalable RFC length (hide or show Footers/Headers/blank lines, font size), print and print preview.
3. RFC Manager shows RFCs in tree view and list view. Users can find, download and open specific RFC easily!
4. Index View illustrates information of all RFCs and build a tree view for IETF drafts. Users can find and view the information of specific document, explore the relative RFCs, open the RFC in the Browser just by one click!
5. Structure View provides a navigating tree of RFC including information of Table of Contents (RFC Browser will build one if it doesn't exist!), References. Readers can discover the outline of RFC and go to any section to get the detail at ease.
6. Page View can help you browse the RFC page by page or turn to the page you want anytime.
7. Hypertext-like browsing: RFC Browser renders RFC Title, Subtitles, Table of Contents, Headers/Footers and Default Text using different fonts. Users can go to the content by clicking on RFC index, the entry of Table of Contents and References as browsing a html file. Hyperlink of authors' URLs help you visit their sites or send E-Mail to them. Go Back and Go Forward function help you browse several sections repeatedly.
8. Scalable: You can hide Footers/Headers and blank lines near them to compact the RFC length, and show new page separators to keep the page breaking information. In addiction, You can adjust the font size to meet your requirement.
9. Download tools can update RFC index file, download single RFC or RFC collection via Internet. When you open a RFC non-existing locally, RFC Browser can download it for you immediately. If you already downloaded the RFC collection, RFC Browser can extract the RFC you want from the collection.
10. Favorite RFCs function helps quickly open the RFCs that you often read.
11. Bookmarks function keeps a list of positions you want to turn to frequently.

1. does NOT support intra-RFC hyperlink, so
   • does NOT support RFC Manager, and
   • does NOT support Index View, and
   • has NO index update tool.
2. does NOT support analysis of References section.
3. has NO Favorite RFCs.
4. has NO Bookmarks.
5. does NOT support drag and drop.
6. does NOT support automatical downloading.

1. is free for None-Commercial use only.
2. could load RFCs with file size < 64k bytes only.
3. is an SDI application, so that it can open only one document at the same time.
4. does NOT support printing and print preview.
5. supports NO options.
6. has NO download tools.

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A: You can buy online: here (Standard Edition) or here (Lite Edition).

Q: What are Colorful, Visual, Scalable Hyper-RFCs?

A: RFC Browser analyzes the RFC (or IETF draft) you open and display a tree view of structure or page-indexing as navigator. It also analyzes RFC Index File (rfc-index.txt) and provides RFC-indexing to help users find and view the specific RFC. Both type of files are shown as hypertexts. Furthermore, flexible operations reformat RFC into a more compact perspective or printing without destroying the original structure and page-indexing.

A: Yes, RFC Browser is designed to do so. However, drafts are drafts, some of them are not well formatted so that it is impossible to parse them right 100%. RFC and IETF draft authors can get a free license and check the format using the Browser.

A: RFC Index File, namly rfc-index.txt, is a file contains citations for all RFCs in numeric order. RFC collection is a zipped package of almost all RFCs. They can be downloaded on many web or FTP sites, e.g., ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/. They will be updated from time to time and RFC Browser's built-in download tools keep your RFCs in up-to-day status.

Q: I don't like some of the text colors, how to change it?

A: You can change the format options, including fonts of RFC Title, Subtitles, Table of Contents, Headers/Footers and Default Text. Click Tools menu, and then Options, click Format tab of the Options dialog, select the Category you want to change color and press button Select. You'd better select the values instead of filling in.

Q: Why unable to save the options?

A: Trial Version does NOT save options, and Free Edition has no options. Please buy Lite or Standard Edition if you find RFC Browser is useful.

Q: I modified an option and saved, but the change didn't take effect, why?

A: The change will take effect on the next action, i.e. next launch or next RFC open depending on what the option is.

Q: I disabled Tip of the Day before, where to activate it again?

A: Menu Help -> Tip of the Day.

Q: When I open rfcxxxx.txt using RFC Browser, the leaves of the tree in Structure View are all wrong, why?

A: There are some RFCs, expecially old ones, which are not written in regular format and some drafts are very initial version and under construction. RFC Browser may NOT work correctly in these case. Fortunately, RFC Browser works well with most RFCs since year 1990 and what we read most were issued after that year. If you find any well-formed RFCs could not be handled by RFC Browser, please contact us via email.

Q: Which edition should I select?

A: If you just want to read some small RFCs, you can use Free Edition (for non-commercial use) or Lite Edition.

If the size of one of the RFCs you want to view is larger than 64k, Lite Edition is enough.

If you read RFCs a lot, Standard Edition helps.

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