Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ASCII

Ascii-art app for OS X?

Wild_Eep — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:43:45 -0800

What is the name of this obscure Mac text editor that draws ASCII art boxes and lines by dragging them out? I last used this app about three years ago, on OS X.

It was a simple text editor, that had a unique feature. You could drag a rectangle and it would create a BBS-style ASCII box. It would also do straight lines. (It may have done more).

Freely downloadable, at no cost. Ran in English.

Get that Chinese out of there!

saysthis — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:10:05 -0800

I'd like to find, or build, a tool for stripping differently encoded text from bilingual (Chinese/English) text documents. Bonus - since this is for subtitles, I need to be able to train it to recognize timecodes and unique characters like returns and hyphens. Double bonus - I know jack about programming, but since the only way to do this right now I have is by hand, which costs me hours and hours of tedium and is putting me at risk for carpal tunnel, I'm definitely willing to put in the time to learn. I'm a subtitle translator, and because of the nature of movie production, where they rarely have a final cut even after I'm done translating and timing the movie, I usually need to make a "master" subtitle file for editing purposes. That is, a subtitle file with both languages, one of which then usually needs to be removed so I can burn a review DVD for the technically inept director or whoever's in charge of making final decisions on the subtitles.

That means that, at the moment, I have to go line by line and delete all the English or Chinese from the file. For a typical movie, with 1000+ lines of dialogue, that's two hours if I'm feeling self-destructive, and my wrists HURT afterward. Not to mention it just zones me out, and I'm usually exhausted after that kind of repetition. It's the kind of work that can destroy a day's productivity, and I usually have to do that 4-5 times per movie. (I know you'll suggest just doing it once and then editing the English, but these people sometimes add/change/remove 2-300 lines of dialogue per edit. I need to be able to look at the source language as I do it, and they, being movie people, provide zero documentation; gotta work from the master sub file or I waste even more time.)

There has got to be a better way, and I'm pretty sure that given the fact that I'm working with two differently encoded languages, it shouldn't be too terribly impossible, right? I'm imagining a tool where I can tell it "take anything that looks like GBK/BIG5 and remove it." Or the same with ASCII. Now, the trick is, it would need to be trainable to recognize and ignore the particular ASCII patterns that subtitle files use for timecodes, returns, font details, and other metadata in the subs.

If it doesn't exist, as God as my witness, I will build it! It seems simple enough. I know absolutely nothing about programming except general principles, but I know that building a tool that can work with text in .txt documents. Some encoding interfaces with the character databases in whatever OS you're using, some wildcard fields for patterns to ignore, and profile memory for different subtitle formats. This is the thing I need.

If this tool doesn't exist yet, what do I need to know to build it? Is there a software language I should focus on? How can I keep this lightweight and distribute it freely once I've got it? Does sourceforge have some sort of development platform for stuff like this?

Help me remember this 4X space game...

CarlRossi — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:54:44 -0800

Looking for a 4X style empire game from my youth. Difficulty: Played it on a VT-100 terminal. Crazy boring details inside. Here's what I remember. Game was made prior to 1993, single player, turn-based, ASCII characters on a VT-100 terminal. (Could be VT-102, but don't hold me to that, let's say it's in the VT-100 family.)

1. It was an Empire style game that took place on a single screen.
2. The screen did not scroll to show more territory.
3. Each planet was represented by a letter. i.e. A, B, C, D...
4. Planets were randomly populated around the screen and the player and computer player started at opposite corners.
5. When ships crossed paths in space, or when your ships attempt to take an enemy planet, they battled. What was unique was an animated counter that showed real-time losses. The victor was the one who had ships remaining at the conclusion of the battle.
6. The winner was the one who controlled all the planets. (Like Empire)
7. One could expect the game to take about 15 - 20 minutes to play.
8. I think I played this on my university's (URI) PR1ME/PrimOS, as opposed to another mainframe. I don't think there was another one, I think the other one was an internet server.

I'm hoping this game wasn't just limited to URI, but was a common PR1ME program for geeks to kill time.

Google searches turn up results that point me to Sins of a Solar Empire and the like, but sometimes I want a game that'll take 15 mins to play instead of days. If there's even a version that will still work today. But nonetheless, I want to know its name.

Tips as to UNIX Shell Script to Programmatically Save a Webpage as a Text File

WCityMike — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:53:03 -0800

I'm writing a shell script to take a webpage and convert it into a text file. I'd appreciate tips as to how to store URLs, save the file with the URL's title as its name, and also just general tips as to how to improve the script and/or achieve the process better. Specific questions inside. I'd like to write a shell script which converts a webpage into a text file. After a lot of tinkering with various note-taking applications, Firefox extensions, and so on, I've found that the best tool for me is just plain good old-fashioned text files. However, I'd love it if I could automate the process a little bit more, and so I'm writing a shell script to get a webpage into a text-form equivalent.

Right now, I've got:

links -dump -width 512 "$1" | cut -c 4- > /tmp/temp.file lynx -listonly -dump "$1" | sed '1,3d' | cut -c 7- >> /tmp/temp.file edit -b /tmp/temp.file

In this example, $1 is a Web address.

What this does is:

Uses links to save the text of the page. I use this instead of lynx because the "-width 512" lets it handle it without inappropriate line breaks, and links seems to let handle punctuation spacing better than lynx. (The "cut" removes the extra lefthand margin.)
Uses lynx to generate the list of links that are on that page, removing the "References" header, margin, and numbering. Links doesn't seem to have any way of recording the URLs when generating a text copy. It appends that to the work in progress.
Sends this to TextWrangler to open up in the background.

I'm seeking the community's advice on this on three points:

The way I've got it working now is okay, but, ideally, I'd like to handle URLs in the way that Mefi's print stylesheet handles it — the URL appearing right after the link text. So in a webpage converted into a text file, instead of it being "Google", it'd be "Google [http://www.google.com]". I'm aware that lynx lets you do footnotes ("[1]Google" and later "1. http://www.google.com"), but lynx's handling of line breaks and spacing isn't great.
I'd then ideally like to have this script save the results automatically to a text file on my Desktop with the URL's TITLE attribute as the name of the file.
I'm wondering if, given the format, any odd punctuation in the URL could screw up the process.
Also, I imagine this might be an enjoyable script for others — and if so, any other modifications to the script that would improve the overall process and/or end goal — and/or any utilities that do this process better than what I'm hacking up — would be appreciated.

What does the construct "?/" refer to in Ruby?

nakedcodemonkey — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:09:49 -0800

What does the construct "?/" refer to in Ruby? The Pragmatic guide for TextMate includes an code fragment that has me stumped. It's essentially "if foo == ?/ then bar" What is the ?/, though?

irb(main):001:0> ?/

=> 47

irb(main):002:0> ?/.class

=> Fixnum

Google is being singularly unhelpful here, since it doesn't like to search for punctuation. The book's errata offers no further hints.

The End of Hack

xz — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:36:53 -0800

back in the early 80's i played this game called Hack121 on my dad's PC for hours and hours. now, to my horror, my little brother has found it again and sent it to me. thing is, after more hours and some cheating, i'm not sure if i've finally "won" or not. anyone familiar with this game? i've made it down to what appears to be the bottom level and it's different from the others; a maze with guards. no matter how often i cruise around it, there are always more guards. and, ta-da, a Sphere of Power! but what this sphere does, i cannot figure. using it does nothing, unless you go up a level and then it "crumbles into dust!"

since i've already wasted a good portion of my life dragging this poor smiley-face around a maze, killing neptos and grabbers, i was hoping someone could put me and it out of our misery with some guidance -- even if the guidance is, "yes. that's it. you've done all there is to do."

google gives me some interesting stuff, but no answers.

and man do i need to get back to work...

Mysterious characters in addresses

chef_boyardee — Tue, 30 May 2006 12:20:11 -0800

Help me figure out these weird Spanish, Danish, and Portugese characters in an address given to me via the Internet. I don't think what I see is what is meant. The sample from Denmark is
ьsterbrogade
where the first character looks like this. That's a Russian letter, so that can't be right. What is the correct character?

The Spanish address is
Gracia 15, 5º 2ª
Where there is Gracia, fifteen, comma, five, then what looks like a degree symbol, then a two, then what looks like a little "a" in superscript. It's rare that I see superscripts in an address so I am worried that these must be written as something else. I actually see a lot of superscripted addresses like this come from Spain.

Similarly, the Portugese address is
Outubro nº 198 6º
where the "n" and "6" are followed by what looks like a degree symbol.

How should these be written?

Converting A Plain Text List Of URLs Into An HTML List of Clickable Links

jack_mo — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:11:24 -0800

What's the easiest way to convert a plain text list of URLs with descriptions into an HTML page of clickable links? I have a long list of URLs and descriptions in a plain text file, formatted like so

### This is a page about monkeys
http://www.monkeypage.com
### This is a page about weasels
http://www.weaselpage.com

and would like to convert them into an XHTML list formatted like so

This is a page about monkeys


This is a page about weasels

What would be the best way to do a conversion like this? I'm running OS 10.4.5, and I'm guessing a good method would involve command line stuff I'm aware of but don't really understand - regular expressions, grep, and the like. Alternatively, since the resulting page is destined for the web, I suppose another option would be a PHP or Perl script to convert the text file on the fly (I only mention PHP and Perl because I have some, very limited, experience with them, and would be lost if someone suggested, eg., a Python solution). I also assume some of the more advanced text editors would be up to the job (though from what I've seen of them, I'm a bit intimidated by the likes of vim or emacs!)

If this is a simple proposition, I'd be very grateful if someone could give examples of commands/possible scripts, if not, pointers to resources about manipulating text files in this way would be great too (I keep everything in plain text files, so am keen to learn about manipulating and repurposing them in general).

Oxford English Trickionary

grumblebee — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:17:45 -0800

The online version of the OED (subscription required) uses an ASCII version of IPA, and I can't figure it out. I need to know how to pronounce the word "succous," which means "containing juice or sap." The OED says it is pronounced "sA.k[e]s." What does the upper-case "A" mean and why is it italicized? What is [e]?

Could someone (a) look "succous" up for me in the PRINT OED and (b) tell me where I can find a guide to the ASCII symbols used in the online OED, so when I run into this problem in the future, I don't have to post here.

Having done some online searches, it SEEMS like the OED uses a system called SAMPA to represent IPA symbols, but SAMPA guides (that I've found) don't contain [e] and they seem to give various meanings to A.

Irritatingly, the OED's own help is not helpful.

NOTE: I've referred to [e] here, but in the OED it's less-than-symbol, e, greater-than-symbol. I forget how to render less-than/greater-thans on AskMe (apersand codes don't work on preview. How does one achieve this?

Why, in the ASCII extended code, are there characters for one half and one quarter, but not one third?

mfbridges — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 12:30:56 -0800

Why, in the ASCII extended code, are there characters for one half and one quarter, but not one third?

OS X 10.3, older fonts, and unusual glyphs.

adamrice — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:20:21 -0800

OS X 10.3, older fonts, and unusual glyphs [more inside] I'm using Panther, and I've got a lot of older postscript fonts from at least the System 7 era. These contain a number of "high-ASCII" characters, like =, that I cannot get at under OS X for some reason. The fonts bundled with OS X show the characters and let me type them as before, but in the older fonts, they're somehow off-limits. Typing the appropriate key combination leaves a blank space, and the "character palette" does not show the font as having the character. And yet, for some reason, the character is visible in the "keyboard viewer."

Has anyone encountered this problem? Any ideas on solving it? Thanks in advance.

ASCII code for the schwa?

archimago — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:29:28 -0800

Anyone know the ASCII code for the schwa? 20 minutes of fruitless Googling and I give up.

I have Unicode text which I need to import into a Moveable Type blog, which requires ASCII imports. What can I do?

alidarbac — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 20:01:28 -0800

ASCII/Unicode conversions/importing into MT problems...[mi] So I'm trying to import a blog with a lot of non-ASCII characters (Chinese saved in Unicode in my case) into Moveable Type 3. I was running into some problems, checked the MT support fora, and found that you have to import in ASCII. But the problem for me with just saving to ASCII is that it would turn all that Chinese into garbled nonsense.

It was suggested to me when I asked that the main problem with trying to import non-ASCII text was with the type of line breaks. MT needs to have Unix-style line breaks (LF) while Unicode plain text stores with Windows-style line breaks (CR/LF).

Would there be some way to take my Unicode formatted export file and convert it to ASCII while preserving the Unicode? For instance, to convert the Unicode to its hexadecimal coding and the line breaks from CR/LF to LF. Would this do the trick? I saw online some Java converters, but that would hardly work with my 2MB export file.

Does anyone else have any experience importing with non-ASCII characters into MT?

Firefox and Unicode

PrinceValium — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 18:57:12 -0800

Why does Firefox insist on loading pages with Unicode character coding, when I prefer Western character coding? The former turns high-ASCII characters like § into question marks; the latter displays these normally. Does this happen to anyone else, and can I fix it?

Family Tree Program

grumblebee — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 15:53:28 -0800

Is there a free/cheap family-tree program (for the PC) that outputs in ascii text (with dashes, pipe-symbols, etc. as the connectors between people) or HTML format?