46 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
# Don Worth's Beneath Apple DOS
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Don Worth wrote a very cool book for the Apple II. Actually, he wrote several,
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but here is one of them that I happened to need. He found a bunch of his disks
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containing the original text in his garage, and he was happy to have [his
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original disks][dons-disks] be released into the hands of whomever might want to
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use them. Since the OCR versions of this book are ... less than great ... I've
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decided to try and convert his originals.
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## The Goal
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I'd like to see a proper version of this book. Text, figures, all of it. To do
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that is not going to be trivial, but it starts with clean text. We don't have
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that on [archive.org][], yet, but perhaps we can fix that? Please feel free to
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join in--send patches, help add stuff, etc.
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## The method
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Documenting this for other texts to be converted in future...
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First we need to extract the text documents from the disks and turn them into
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something we can use on a modern system:
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1. The DOS 3.3 disks were dumped using cppo
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2. Apply `scripts/extract_piewriter.py` to each document file which did the
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following transformations:
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* For characters 0xa0-0xfe, strip the high bit to get pure ASCII
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* Convert 0x0d and 0x8d (return) characters ti 0x0a (newline)
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* Escape all else in C-style
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3. Remove NUL at end of .txt files and renamed the assembly source to .s
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4. Remove trailing whitespace
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6. Normalize dot commands (lowercase, spacing) for easier mechanical parsing.
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7. Remove the obvious dot commands (.pp is a paragraph break, .sp creates
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vertical space, .br seems to be a line break, .bp a page break) and attempt
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to remove or interpret others as seems appropriate
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This process has probably broken the .s files and there were some files that
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don't appear to have actually been part of the text (or maybe they were edits
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and revisions?), and there was bitrot in the files suggesting the disks the
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source documents were stored on were losing their integrity.
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[dons-disks]: http://www.6502lane.net/2015/03/12/don-worths-beneath-apple-dos-original-text-files/
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[archive.org]: https://archive.org/
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