Letter from Les Cottrell, Cocoa, FL.
I have done this several times using two different schemes. The last time I took a file done on a MAC in MSWord, moved it across a network SAVEd as an ASCII file to an IBM and then to Larken. To make it easy to find I use a disk with only the files I want to convert.
1. Using the Larken Disk Editor I searched using the “Edit a block” function until I find the beginning of the text I want. I write down the address and look for the end of the text on that block and write that down. Also look for any ASCII codes that won’t be in MSCRIPT such as 9 for tab. (MSCRIPT tab stops are “padded” with spaces – 32’s.) Then I break out of the Editor and do a code save such as “text1.CT” CODE (start), (length). You may find more than one place with MSDOS text on a Larken block so I save the next as “text2.CT CODE (start), (length). This process is repeated until all the text is located and SAVEd over to Larken files.
2. Then I load MSCRIPT and load “text1.CT”. If you then look at a file with tabs in it will have short lines where tabs were. I then break out of MSCRIPT and add a few lines of basic to correct this such as:
1000 FOR 1=46927 to (46927+length of file):IF PEEK 1=9 THEN POKE 1,32
1010 NEXT 1Then GOTO 1000 will find the tabs and replace them with a single space. MSCRIPT doesn’t have much room left for added basic so keep it short. The last line of basic in my version of MSCRIPT is 950 so 1000 was a safe starting point. 46927 is where the CT files start and of course 32 is a space. You could also delete the unknown codes using “delete left” or “delete” keys if you only had a few problems. After I finish this I always delete lines 1000 and 1010 just in case.
3. Next I run MSCRIPT and add spaces where needed to get the tabs lined up. Some other cleanup such as added carriage returns might also be required. File is SAVEd with a new name from MSCRIPT.
4. Steps 2 and 3 are repeated until all the files are cleaned up.
5. Now I would load “name1” and assuming that it was only part of what I had in MSDOS I would merge “name2” and so on until I had the file recreated in MSCRIPT. The is SAVEd again as “final1”.
The last file that I converted was the Larken DOS cartridge disassembly that was done in 2 columns as I had quite a bit of cleanup, but I ended up with the same thing in MSCRIPT that I had started out with in MSWord on the MAC.
The other method is to use a utility called MSDOS.Bx written by George Chambers of the Toronto Users Club and published on page 8 of May ’90 Sinc-Link. (George Chambers; [address omitted]) He has built the “unknown” code remover into his program. I used this program to convert the index of all Sinc-Link articles from MSDOS disk to MSCRIPT and it worked quite well.
Editor’s comments: I have used George Chambers’ MSDOSOS.Bx several times but I thought that Les’s information would be helpful to someone with other than a Larken interface. If someone gets this running on other than a Larken disk interface please let me know or let Frank Davis of UPDATE MAGAZINE know because it might be handy for someone else to use. (UPDATE MAGAZINE; P. O. BOX 1095; Peru IN 46970). Further information is available in the form of documents for MSDOS.Bx which I can supply. 0/0