Handling binary format of an old word processor

Handling binary format of an old word processor

[Trevor Jenkins]

I have a group of files created long ago with a word processor for the BBC Micro. The word processor(WordWide/WordWisePlus), which originated in the late 1980s, saved documents in a sort of binary format in that some 7-bit printable characters have the eighth bit set to indicate that the character was preceded on screen by a carriage return. Other old ASCII control codes such as SI and SO were used for italics (I think). There are also encapsulated Epson dot-matrix setup sequences at the start of the files. Had a few read throughs of the Pandoc/Lua filter documentation but simply cannot get my head around how these documents could be processed using a Lua filter for pandoc to convert what is essentially a stream of 8-bit bytes into a form that can be used to convert to a modern format.

Would appreciate some pointers to how to handle this task using pandoc and Lua? Otherwise I will have write some one-off throw away C code that does not help me in using Lua for future tasks.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

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Re: Handling binary format of an old word processor

['William Lupton' via pandoc-discuss]

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I think you need to use a custom reader. Here's a link to the appropriate
bit of the appropriate page.
https://pandoc.org/custom-readers.html#bytestring-readers

On Thu, 13 Jul 2023, 14:11 Trevor Jenkins, <bslwannabe-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I have a group of files created long ago with a word processor for the BBC
> Micro. The word processor(WordWide/WordWisePlus), which originated in the
> late 1980s, saved documents in a sort of binary format in that some 7-bit
> printable characters have the eighth bit set to indicate that the character
> was preceded on screen by a carriage return. Other old ASCII control codes
> such as SI and SO were used for italics (I think). There are also
> encapsulated Epson dot-matrix setup sequences at the start of the files.
> Had a few read throughs of the Pandoc/Lua filter documentation but simply
> cannot get my head around how these documents could be processed using a
> Lua filter for pandoc to convert what is essentially a stream of 8-bit
> bytes into a form that can be used to convert to a modern format.
>
> Would appreciate some pointers to how to handle this task using pandoc and
> Lua? Otherwise I will have write some one-off throw away C code that does
> not help me in using Lua for future tasks.
>
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
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> "pandoc-discuss" group.
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> .
>

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Re: Handling binary format of an old word processor

[Trevor Jenkins]

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> On 13 Jul 2023, at 19:28, 'William Lupton' via pandoc-discuss <pandoc-discuss-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> I think you need to use a custom reader. Here's a link to the appropriate bit of the appropriate page. https://pandoc.org/custom-readers.html#bytestring-readers <https://pandoc.org/custom-readers.html#bytestring-readers>
Thanks. I had stumbled across that and caused me to post my original email.

I wish there were a worked example of how to use that to process arbitrary binary data.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

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Re: Handling binary format of an old word processor

['William Lupton' via pandoc-discuss]

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I can't speak from experience here, but it seems that you can probably use
lpeg (illustrated in the example in the docs) to process binary data. This
is suggested by https://github.com/spc476/LPeg-Parsers. It would be fun to
try!

On Sat, 15 Jul 2023, 09:38 Trevor Jenkins, <bslwannabe-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 13 Jul 2023, at 19:28, 'William Lupton' via pandoc-discuss <
> pandoc-discuss-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> I think you need to use a custom reader. Here's a link to the appropriate
> bit of the appropriate page.
> https://pandoc.org/custom-readers.html#bytestring-readers
>
>
> Thanks. I had stumbled across that and caused me to post my original email.
>
> I wish there were a worked example of how to use that to process arbitrary
> binary data.
>
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
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> .
>

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