topic Re: DEC Supplemental Text in Operating System - OpenVMS

DEC Supplemental Text

SCott_36 — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 20:34:09 GMT

Have a file with DEC supplemental Character set text file. What to view it with a window XP system.
Files came from old openVMS database. Partially viewable in windows text editor, partially scrabled. Want to read it all.

Help.
Thanks in Advance
Scott

Re: DEC Supplemental Text

Craig A Berry — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 00:29:18 GMT

I believe that is a subset of the DEC Multinational Character set. If you have access to an OpenVMS system, you can install the internationalization kit and use the DECMCS_UTF-8 conversion with the iconv utility. Depending on your Windows text editor, the UTF-8 may be readable as is, or may require further conversion to something else. Otherwise, the listing of the DEC MCScode points at the following URL may be helpful:

http://www.funet.fi/pub/kermit/charsets/decmcs.txt

Re: DEC Supplemental Text

Michael Schulte zur Sur — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 11:49:00 GMT

Hi,

do you have a terminal emulation line reflection or smarterm?

Michael

Re: DEC Supplemental Text

Martin P.J. Zinser — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 12:41:47 GMT

Hi Scott,

if you do still have your VMS system around, edit the file in a terminal emulator on your VMS system. As Michael mentioned, the better ones support the DEC encodings. Having the text on the screen a copy and paste should be all that is needed to move the file to your PC.

If all you have is the files, you can either roll your own converter in the language of your choice using the information Craig provided or try to use e.g. enscript (which supports DEC NCS) to turn the text into postscript and then run a text extractor on the resulting postscript.

Greetings, Martin