beneath-apple-dos/README.md
2017-07-21 04:45:23 -07:00

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# 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][dons-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
Documenting this for other texts to be converted in future...
First we need to extract the text documents from the disks and turn them into
something we can use on a modern system:
1. The DOS 3.3 disks were dumped using cppo
2. Apply `scripts/extract_piewriter.py` to each document file which did the
following transformations:
* 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 and renamed the assembly source to .s
4. Remove trailing whitespace
6. Normalize dot commands (lowercase, spacing) for easier mechanical parsing.
7. Remove the obvious dot commands (.pp is a paragraph break, .sp creates
vertical space, .br seems to be a line break, .bp a page break) and attempt
to remove or interpret others as seems appropriate
This process has probably broken the .s files and there were some files that
don't appear to have actually been part of the text (or maybe they were edits
and revisions?), and there was bitrot in the files suggesting the disks the
source documents were stored on were losing their integrity.
[dons-disks]: http://www.6502lane.net/2015/03/12/don-worths-beneath-apple-dos-original-text-files/
[archive.org]: https://archive.org/