Subject: Re: ChinaStar/ETEN

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 17 May 91 13:12:29 MDT

Ned Walsh writes:
 > Speaking of ChinaStar...I typed up about 75 poems in ChinaStar, and
 > would now like to work on them using ETEN.  Any suggestions on how to
 > go about converting them?  I tried all the conversion possibilities I
 > could think of using ETEN's ETUTL program; none seemed to work, so I
 > assume ChinaStar uses its own proprietary coding system....But I'm new
 > to much of this and really don't know what I'm doing.  I'm willing to
 > go to a certain amount of trouble to design a conversion utility
 > between the two programs, if someone can describe to me in simple
 > language what needs to be done.
 >

OK.  The approach I would take is this:  first I would try to get some
kind of table of the ETEN layout.  The last ETEN manual I looked at
didn't have one of these, but they may have added one in later
manuals.  If I didn't have one, I would probably write a program that
generated all of the codes and "words" they map to.  This means
something like:

    for (i = 0xa1; i < 0xf7; i++) {
       for (j = 0x40; j < 0xfe; j++)
        printf("0x%02x%02x - %c%c\n", i, j, i, j);
    }

After breaking the output file into separate pages, I would print the
pages.

You may want to experiment with starting the loops at lower values and
anding them at higher values until you find out the exact range that
is available.

After doing the same thing with ChinaStar, you have two piles of paper
to compare.  Now the hard work begins.  Reading sequentially from one
printout, you look up each "word" in the other printout.  Since you
printed the code along with the "word", you can start building a
correspondence table; code xxxx in the ETEN printout matches code xxxx
in the ChinaStar printout.

Painful way to do it, but sometimes there seems no way around it.

The paper analogy could be transfered to computer: given one machine
running ETEN and one machine running ChinaStar, you could page through
each file you generated and start recording the correspondences.

Well, being lazy :-), this is the first method I thought about,
hopefully someone else has a better approach.
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[email-masked]                      "I laughed.
Mark Leisher                                I cried.
Computing Research Lab                          I fell down.
New Mexico State University                        It changed my life."
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