[GreenKeys] RTTY Art JAVA Viewer Facelift

[William Bytheway]

Bob,

One of the requirements RTTYApp had to do was support ITA2 Morray, Telex and
Military codes; all Baudot 5-bit code sequences.  I provided all three to
W7TTY for his broadcasts, but George always stayed with the military code.
RTTYApp was not designed to transmit pictures, one of it's requirements was
to rewrite the "cr" and "lf" sequence to a standard "cr/cr/lf" sequence.
This allowed adequate time for those older mechanical platens to catch up.
This is one of the reasons that RTTYArt was written, to allow for the
capture and re-transmission of picture in either the raw BAUDOT format or
ASCII format via RS-232.

At RTTY.COM, we have adopted a minor modification in the file extensions
used to identify the pieces. A ".PIX" file indicates a one-pass print mode.
A ".POX" file identifies an overstrike or multiple pass type of picture.
Very simple and easy to understand.  A ".POX" file is corrupted if it is
edited and saved using a standard DOS or Windows Notepad editor.

With respect to an editor, it would be much easier to take the source code
for an existing editor and modify it to respect the "cr" and "lf" sequences
as the original author wanted. I estimate that it would take about 80 hours
to develop, build and test such an editor, regardless if it was written in
PASCAL, FORTRAN, C, C++ or JAVA.  Any takers?

Since there is no Baudot editor that I know of, then ASCII is probably the
best storage medium, and HEX editors are freely available. Most of us can
easily work with ASCII HEX and not "freak out". I would not want to try to
HEX edit a 5-bit baudot code mapped to an 8-bit ASCII byte.

Shown below is the translation tables used in RTTYApp. Given that these
codes are defined, it's a no-brainer to convert 5 level code to ASCII and
back again, using ASCII as the baseline standard.  RTTYArt could handle
other protocols (including 6-level) given the correct translation table.

73,
K7TTY

A snippit from the RTTYApp source code:

/************************************
           ITA2    Telex Mil.
No. Letter Figure  Fig.  Fig.   ITA2
--- ------ ------  ----- -----  -----
 1   A      -      -     -      YYBBB
 2   B      ?      ?     ?      YBBYY
 3   C      :      :     :      BYYYB
 4   D      $(1)   wru   $      YBBYB
 5   E      3      3     3      YBBBB
 6   F      %(2)   $     !      YBYYB
 7   G      &(2)   &     &      BYBYY
 8   H      #(2)   #     stop   BBYBY
 9   I      8      8     8      BYYBB
10   J      @(3)   bell  '      YYBYB
11   K      (      (     (      YYYYB
12   L      )      )     )      BYBBY
13   M      .      .     .      BBYYY
14   N      ,      ,     ,      BBYYB
15   O      9      9     9      BBBYY
16   P      0      0     0      BYYBY
17   Q      1      1     1      YYYBY
18   R      4      4     4      BYBYB
19   S      '(3)   '     bell   YBYBB
20   T      5      5     5      BBBBY
21   U      7      7     7      YYYBB
22   V      =      ;     ;      BYYYY
23   W      2      2     2      YYBBY
24   X      /      /     /      YBYYY
25   Y      6      6     6      YBYBY
26   Z      +(4)   "     "      YBBBY
27  cr      cr     cr    cr     BBBYB
28  lf      lf     lf    lf     BYBBB
29  ls      ls     ls    ls     YYYYY
30  fs      fs     fs    fs     YYBYY
31  sp      sp     sp    sp     BBYBB
*************************************/
/* finis */