Using a customized character set
You do not have to use full extended ASCII character set, if you do not need all the characters. For example, a French company might convert only the French characters, and leave others such as German and Spanish characters as multicodes.
To create a customized character set
1 Make a list of the characters you want to use, and their positions in the extended ASCII character set. For example, ä is in position 132.
2 Edit bineas.dat and go to that position in the file. (Start counting from 0 not from 1 and count across the rows). Note the value which appears in this position. For the ä character, its octal punch code is 07104 (all punch codes for the extended ASCII set start with 07). Repeat this step for each character that you need. Close bineas.dat when you have finished.
3 Take a copy of binasc.dat and edit this copy. Do not edit binasc.dat itself.
4 Go to the position of the first character you want to use (you should find a zero value in this position) and replace the current value with the one you noted down for this character. Repeat this step for all other characters you want to use. For example, go to position 132 and replace the zero with 07104.
The characters which Quantum usually recognizes have non-zero values: do not change these. Of the remaining characters set to zero, do not change:
▪Those which do not correspond to printable characters (for example, on computers with standard ASCII, values 0 to 31 are special control characters such as tab and new line). Changing these characters could be dangerous.
▪Position 127 (that is, the 127th value) on UNIX and Windows, and position 255 under IBM, since Quantum uses this character to mark the end of the data and the start of the multicoded bit strings in each card.
To convert the file to binary
Type:
bintab -o filename bintab.qt
where filename is the name of the file you have created.
See also