[GreenKeys] RTTY Art JAVA Viewer Facelift

[Tom Jennings]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Jim Walls wrote:

> The example a few days ago included a human readable text description of the 
> art.  I would suggest adding a description of the format (simple) mainly so 
> new people would not have to find an explanation.  You could even have the 
> software add the human readable character to the right of the hole printout. 
> It would add a rather noticable amount to the file size, but we're just not 
> really talking that much data..  For example:

I agree with you on one item, and disagree on another :-)

I agree it should have human-readable header data, regardless of
the scheme used. I suggest beginning description lines with some
simple agreed-upon character, like "#".

However, a fundamental issue is that the "meaning" of a row of
holes depends on the machine that produced it, and the machine
that interprets it later.

XXXXX BLANK

Is system-dependent, where the whole point of the file is to ONLY,
singly, describe the holes on the tape. There's no place -- and I
would argue there should not be -- any semantic junk contained in
the file that represents the pattern of holes on the tape.

In fact the assigning of meaning to the pattern of holes on the
tape is the *problem*; the pattern of holes on a Model 19 that
means the letter "A" can be converted to "A" in ASCII, but FIGS
cannot, etc. If this was all OK for us, the ASCII conversions of
tapes would be OK and we wouldn't be having this discussion :-)


All that

XXXXX

"means" is that there are five holes in a row on tape. WHat
those holes represents is up to you.