Don Worth's Beneath Apple DOS

Don Worth wrote a very cool book for the Apple II. Actually, he wrote several, but here is one of them that I happened to need. He found a bunch of his disks containing the original text in his garage, and he was happy to have his original disks be released into the hands of whomever might want to use them. Since the OCR versions of this book are ... less than great ... I've decided to try and convert his originals.

The Goal

I'd like to see a proper version of this book. Text, figures, all of it. To do that is not going to be trivial, but it starts with clean text. We don't have that on archive.org, yet, but perhaps we can fix that? Please feel free to join in--send patches, help add stuff, etc.

The method

1. The DOS 3.3 disks were dumped using cppo
2. Apply the following transformations to each document file:
   • For characters 0xa0-0xfe, strip the high bit to get pure ASCII
   • Convert 0x0d and 0x8d (return) characters ti 0x0a (newline)
   • Escape all else in C-style
3. Remove NUL at end of .txt files
4. .pp dot command is paragraph break, replace with blank line.
5. Remove trailing whitespace
6. Normalize case and spacing of dot commands (lowercase here)

This has probably broken the .s files a bit, and I haven't bothered to decompile the five byte HELLO ... ;)