18 Dec
2006
18 Dec
'06
12:36 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 18 Dec 2006 at 11:41, Kevin Handy wrote:
This program is for the DecMate II version (RX50), and
it's been a while since I've done anything with it, so I may be
misremembering things. It deals with with the weirdness in
the 8-bit/128(?) byte RX50 format. It predates HTML, and thus
doesn't even pretend to support it. It outputs to WordPerfect
version 5 format. It also tries to handle overprinted (foreign)
characters.
Every version of Word-??, DecWord-?? seemed to use
very different file formats, so I'm not surprised that the
RX01 version is different from the RX50 version. But you
had to do a RX transfer to transport them, so they could
do a format conversion at the same time.
I no longer have any DecMate II users, so the program
has suffered from stagnation. But, I thought it might be
useful to others.
If you wanted to convert from WPS-8 to
WordPerfect, then I
could offer my code at http://srv.net/~kth .
I think that the internal format is "similiar" to Word-11, but
Word-11 didn't pack 3 characters into 2 12-bit words.
you might be able to use it as a basis for understanding the
format and writing your own conversion program, but
reverse engineering would still be required.
We must be looking at different versions of WPS 8. The version that
I have (on RX01 diskettes) packs 4 characters into 2 12-bit words,
but the disk storage layout is a bit bizarre (3 physical sectors with
data interleaved to produce a single logical sector) and there are
numerous "escape" codes for switching to upper/lower case, bold,
underline, ruler, etc.
I've got a converter that I wrote that converts from WPS-8 RX01
images to HTML files. Why HTML? Because people already know how to
cut and paste HTML into their word processor and HTML can be read by
any web browser, regardless of hardware platform.