[GreenKeys] RTTY Art JAVA Viewer Facelift

[Tom Jennings]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Bob Camp wrote:

> Here's what I would propose:
>
> 1) We need a way to edit the file
> 2) We need a way to display the file
> 3) We need a way to generate the file

Well this all got out of hand :-) My fault I admit.

The fundamental problem as I see it is, tape. Holes punched on
long thin strips of paper are just holes. They are not
"characters". The one thing we agree on, is that the particular
order of holes on the tape is important and needs to be preserved.

See, this convert-to-ascii-and-save method, PIX and POX files, is
an attempt to do two things in one step:

1. save the contents of the tapes (hole patterns)
2. present the data to the human bean

I believe we need to separate out these two tasks. A simple representation
of the actual hole pattern is the most unambiguous method I can think of.

Another way to preserve literal tape contents (and not tape "meaning"
which we leave to humans and their computer programs) would
be to do the usual binary-weighted numeric conversion and save all the 
numbers. Eg. the usual code table:

hole pattern 	number		(meaning)
00000		0		nul, leader, non-printing space
00001   	1		"E"
00010		2		line feed
...

ANd in the file put only the numbers,

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 20 12 14 11 20 3

It's klunky, but actually smaller in size.

One catch with it is, you have to know the tape width, eg.
symbols run 0 - 31. You could solve this with some sort
of header thing:

# This is the tape label
NUM=32
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 20 12 14 11 20 3



where NUM is a thing that programs which interpret the data uses.