31 Dec
2022
31 Dec
'22
1 a.m.
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern devices, so you keep
the ← and ↑ 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
Ben.
31 Dec
31 Dec
6:33 a.m.
There's a 'Teleprinter' font, which is close, but doesn't include the
backward arrow:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000819043545/ourworld.compuserve.com/homepage…
On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 4:00 AM ben via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern
devices, so you keep
the ← and ↑ 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
Ben.
6:56 a.m.
I remember having to do something like that some years ago. If the ASCII file isn't
too long and you can manage with manual edits, you can load the document into an editor
that supports 'alt' codes. On Windows, I just tried Microsoft Word.
Hold the alt key down and enter the 2-digit code (on the numeric keypad) for the symbol
you wish... ↑ is 24, and ← is 27. Just did a quick test and both printed fine on my HP
printer, although as I recall the resulting symbols didn't look quite like the arrows
in the original document.
On Saturday, December 31, 2022 at 04:00:33 AM EST, ben via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern devices, so you keep
the ← and ↑ 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
Ben.
1 Jan
1 Jan
5:38 a.m.
On Sat, 31 Dec 2022, ben wrote:
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern
devices, so you keep the ?
and ? 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
I'm scratching my head... you want to keep the question marks?
But I guess you mean the back arrow and the up arrow.
Christian
5:53 a.m.
Folks - wishing all a Good New Year
Ben
The first ingredient must be a printer with a a suitable font table, in these times of
soft fonts that should be a given or tractable.
The second element is to convert to and use an MCS / multibyte character representation -
which can differentiate _ ^ and the desired arrow marks.
To do this you could:
- load the file into an editor, save it in MCS format, perform the necessary substitutions
(two global replaces)
- write a program / script to achieve the same effect, read char and convert/translate to
MCS octets.
Note. It is just possible you will find a font with the arrows in the upper 128 glyphs of
8 bit "ascii", in which case you can skip the MCS conversion.
HtH
Martin
-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Corti via cctalk [mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org]
Sent: 01 January 2023 13:39
To: ClassicCmp <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Cc: Christian Corti <cc(a)informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>
Subject: [cctalk] Re: How to print old files.
On Sat, 31 Dec 2022, ben wrote:
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern
devices, so you keep the ?
and ? 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
I'm scratching my head... you want to keep the question marks?
But I guess you mean the back arrow and the up arrow.
Christian
6:27 a.m.
On 2023-01-01 6:53 a.m., Martin Bishop wrote:
Folks - wishing all a Good New Year
Ben
The first ingredient must be a printer with a a suitable font table, in these times of
soft fonts that should be a given or tractable.
The second element is to convert to and use an MCS / multibyte character representation -
which can differentiate _ ^ and the desired arrow marks.
To do this you could:
- load the file into an editor, save it in MCS format, perform the necessary
substitutions (two global replaces)
- write a program / script to achieve the same effect, read char and convert/translate to
MCS octets.
Note. It is just possible you will find a font with the arrows in the upper 128 glyphs
of 8 bit "ascii", in which case you can skip the MCS conversion.
HtH
Martin
A filter of some kind is needed.
With the rise of emulators for old machines,I can see text being written
with terminal emulation of the orginal i/o devices, but that leaves
printing or tranfering text files a problem.
JOE could have a REAL - big iron 67, SAM runs windows 2000, TOM has a
micro VAX. Every thing gets dumped to the cloud.
One must keep data as files, none of this crappy mess that this modern
'buy a app' to print,or read.
How does one share binary and paper tape/cards as files?
Ben.
PS: Back to inventing big iron 67.
tag line: Cloud computing delayed to to bad weather, server is under 3
feet of snow.
5:56 a.m.
On 2023-01-01 6:38 a.m., Christian Corti via cctalk wrote:
On Sat, 31 Dec 2022, ben wrote:
' ? and ? 's '
The joys of the many standards of text encoding.
I suppose the only way would be to write filters for older text
like ascii 63,65 and field data in K&R C, or assembly to encode it to
utf-8 Unicode.
Ben.
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern
devices, so you keep
the ? and ? 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
I'm scratching my head... you want to keep the question marks?
But I guess you mean the back arrow and the up arrow.
Christian 
9:02 a.m.
On 1/1/23 05:56, ben via cctalk wrote:
' ? and ? 's '
The joys of the many standards of text encoding.
I suppose the only way would be to write filters for older text
like ascii 63,65 and field data in K&R C, or assembly to encode it to
utf-8 Unicode.
Ben.
You didn't specify the printer or the operating system. However, on
Linux, I'd first run iconv to get the thing to UTF-8 and then run a
short sed to convert the characters to the corresponding code point
characters.
But that's Linux and me. May we assume that you're running an OS out
of Redmond?
--Chuck
11:01 a.m.
On 2023-01-01 10:02 a.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
But that's Linux and me. May we assume that you're running an OS out
of Redmond?
No out my basement :)
I got a DE1 FPGA card here, and putting a classic style computer on it.
New year, new design, new front panel.
I have a few designs out but they
all use ASCII 1967. I am unhappy with ASCII so I want to come up with my
own character standard , lower case and some programming symbols. Left
arrow, not equals, logic not,sub script 10,little dash. Programming the
key board and video display is no problem, but printing is a problem. I
can send text files/receive text files to a windows machine for editing
and printing.
I am also unhappy with all the programming languages out there, so I
want write my own, using a meta compiler.
What I would like to get is a serial printer (rs232), with a definable
character set. Does any one know of a cheap one?
--Chuck
Ben.
11:14 a.m.
On 1/1/23 11:01, ben via cctalk wrote:
What I would like to get is a serial printer (rs232), with a definable
character set. Does any one know of a cheap one?
Look around for a later dot-matrix printer (e.g. Epson, Oki, etc.) Many
have downloadable font features and serial options.
--Chuck
4 Jan
4 Jan
5:24 p.m.
There are some printers out there with ASCII 63 selectable via a DIP
switch. For example a Teletype Model 43. Sorry, I don't happen to know
what other printers might also have this feature.
-ken
On Sat, Dec 31, 2022 at 4:00 AM ben via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
How do you print old files in ASCII 63 to modern
devices, so you keep
the ← and ↑ 's
and not printing _ and ^ ?
Ben.
482
days inactive
487
days old
10 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
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ben -
Christian Corti -
Chuck Guzis -
Hugh Pyle -
Kenneth Gober -
Martin Bishop -
Scott LaBombard