[GreenKeys] RTTY Art JAVA Viewer Facelift

[Bob Camp]

Hi

By far the most easy and strait forward way to save the data is to use 
the convention that already exists. A one equals a one and a zero 
equals a zero. Bytes store ones and zeros just fine. I doubt we will 
have to wonder about what a one and a zero in a byte means. Storing the 
five bit data as bits in a byte is a very reasonable way to go.

The question is weather or not we want to be able to work with those 
bytes only as binary data. If the high order bits in the byte are all 
zeros then they are binary and that's the way it goes. More or less 
that means that a number of us won't be writing anything to work with 
the files. We also could set the high order bits to something other 
than zeros. That would enable some other options, but also make some 
other things more complex. As far as I can tell we are going with 
zero's in the high bits and no other features in the file.

	Take Care!

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ



On Jan 26, 2005, at 6:29 PM, Tom Jennings wrote:

> 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.
>
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