hTXT Viewer

A set of tools for viewing Hebrew DOS Text files.

This tool supports viewing old DOS plaintext files written in Hebrew (Code page 862, a.k.a MS-DOS Hebrew or OEM Hebrew).

Basic ASCII Art via Code page 437 is supported as well, as well as some ANSI escape codes. In order to accurately display the ASCII art, a fixed width font (Classic Console Neue) is used.

Tools

Online Viewer

An online viewer can be found here. The viewer converts the old text files to UTF-8, and allows exporting the result to an image. Since Code Page 437 was frequently used in NFO Files, this tool can be considered a basic Online NFO Viewer as well.

Python Script

The Python script under scripts can be used to convert the text files to images or UTF-8 text files.

$ python3 hTXT.py -h
usage: hTXT.py [-h] [-w CONSOLE_WIDTH] [-s] [-f {image,text}] (-i INPUT | -id INPUT_DIR) [-o OUTPUT | -od OUTPUT_DIR]

Decode old Hebrew text files encoded with Code Page 862

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -w CONSOLE_WIDTH, --console-width CONSOLE_WIDTH
                        Console width
  -s, --skip_ansi       Skip ANSI Color codes
  -f {image,text}, --format {image,text}
                        Output format
  -i INPUT, --input INPUT
                        Input file
  -id INPUT_DIR, --input-dir INPUT_DIR
                        Input directory (Only the following extensions are parsed: {'.sos', '.ans', '.msg', '.txt', '.asc', '.nfo', '.ansi'})
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        Output file
  -od OUTPUT_DIR, --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Output directory

The default is to export the source text files to an image.

While an image output format is usually able to accurately represent the original file layout, converting to a UTF-8 text file sometimes has minor formatting issues. This is mainly due to the fact that the conversion process includes translation from Visual Hebrew to Logical Hebrew, a procedure which was not designed to maintain formatting such as ASCII art.

Example usage:

$ # Will save the output file to the same directory as the input file
$ python3 ./hTXT.py -i /home/user/input/file1.ans
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/file1.ans'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/input/file1.png'
1 file(s) processed

$ # Will save the output file to the same directory as the input file
$ python3 ./hTXT.py -i /home/user/input/file1.ans --format image
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/file1.ans'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/input/file1.png'
1 file(s) processed

$ # Will save the output file to the provided output path
$ python3 ./hTXT.py -i /home/user/input/file1.ans -o /home/user/output/file1_output.png
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/file1.ans'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/output/file1_output.png'
1 file(s) processed

$ # Will save the output file to the provided output directory
$ python3 ./hTXT.py -i /home/user/input/file1.ans -od /home/user/output/
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/file1.ans'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/output/file1.png'
1 file(s) processed

$ # For each file under the input directory, will save a matching output file under the output directory
$ python3 ./hTXT.py -id /home/user/input/ -od /home/user/output/
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/file1.ans'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/output/file1.png'
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/child/file2.asc'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/output/child/file2.png'
2 file(s) processed

$ # Save as a text file
$ python3 ./hTXT.py -i /home/user/input/file1.ans -o /home/user/output/out.txt --format text
[INFO] Parsing '/home/user/input/file1.ans'
[INFO] Saved to '/home/user/output/out.txt'
1 file(s) processed

The script depends on the Pillow (PIL fork) library:

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

For text conversion, the python-bidi package is needed as well:

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade python-bidi

Examples

These examples were contributed by Uri Tidhar (Anaesthesia BBS Archive) and received from @hananc as part of the Israeli Digital History Preservation Project.

If you have additional materials, please contact Hanan and help preserve the history of Israeli computing!

The original text files are available under the examples folder.

Image Output

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Text Output

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The text output is best viewed in an editor which supports a fixed-width font (such as Notepad++), with right-to-left text alignment.