[GreenKeys] RTTY Art JAVA Viewer Facelift

[Bob Camp]

Hi

The nice thing about doing it with the x's and o's is that it is pure 
ASCII. You can edit it with just about anything at all.

The concern I have with it is on the "reader" end. It's a bit 
cumbersome to read unless the display program is specifically written 
to use it. That's an issue with any format, but I think it would be a 
little more work with this one.

I did a little math on the file size stuff. Roughly speaking 20K bytes 
is an hour of tape at 60 wpm. I don't remember sitting and running on 
the air copy for more than 10 hours so 200K is likely to be the upper 
limit for any of these files with a 1:1 mapping. With a 7:1 mapping you 
take the file up to about 1.4 meg max. Still not an enormous file size.

If you go back to a two hour file at 40K then A DVD will hold 55,555 
pictures. That would take me about 12 years of 24 hour a day reading to 
get into digital form. I both doubt that I have that much time to spare 
and doubt that there are > 10,000 pictures out there ...

	Take Care!

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ

On Jan 23, 2005, at 12:55 AM, Tom Jennings wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Bob Camp wrote:
>
>> If we take five level code and save it as eight level code then we 
>> have an extra three bits to fill up.
>>
>> If we set them to all zeros then that's fine, but it eliminates 
>> handling the file as anything other than a binary file. That's ok but 
>> if it's binary then you don't get any comments or added notes.
>
> Another way that sounds silly but would eliminate the ambiguity would
> be to make a more literal representation of the hole pattern. I know 
> about
> character code translations but sometimes the brutal is the way to go:
>
>
>
>
> # This tape was labeled "SNOOPY XMAS 1 Jan 1970"
> .....
> .....
> .....
> .....
> .....
> .....
> .....
> X...X
> XX..X
> ..X.X
>
>
>
>
> It's 5X (or 8X) larger than a simple character transfer but
> eliminates all ambiguity, and really, how many characters is even
> a 6" roll of paper tape anyways?
>
> Assuming that the left-most bit is most-significant, it would
> handle tapes of any width with no additional knowledge.
>
> Ignoring blank lines, and lines beginning with "#" would let you
> comment it, print it, etc. Lines terminated with CR, LF, or CR/LF
> would be simply the usual text translation problem, and even
> bad translations non-harmful.
>
> All that's left is to choose a character for NO-HOLE and HOLE.
> 1/0, ./X, whatever.
>
>
> There's a time for elegance, and there's time for a 2x4 up 'side
> the head :-)
>
> tomj
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