How do I get pc line drawing characters to show up in qtalk?

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qdn.public.qnxrtp.newuser
1

I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port (so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display them in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df. This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders (like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy

2

I think that pterm has a ‘terminal’ font?

John Eddy <john.h.eddy@lmco.com> wrote:

I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port (so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display them in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df. This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders (like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy

–
cburgess@qnx.com

3

I tried it, and it does not map the line drawing characters right.

There is one called term and one called pc term. Neither of these works.

I have seen the screen start outputting line drawing characters (when it
shouldn’t) when I got some garbage on the serial line from plugging and
unplugging the serial cable, so I am wondering if there is an alternate
character set thing going on??

Thanks,

John Eddy
“Colin Burgess” <cburgess@qnx.com> wrote in message
news:bageda$o3q$1@nntp.qnx.com…

I think that pterm has a ‘terminal’ font?

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy



\

cburgess@qnx.com

4

John Eddy <john.h.eddy@lmco.com> wrote:

I tried it, and it does not map the line drawing characters right.

There is one called term and one called pc term. Neither of these works.

The following fonts;

PC Term
PC Serif
PC Sanserif

are in IBM437 encoding.
term maps to PC Term.

Regards.

I have seen the screen start outputting line drawing characters (when it
shouldn’t) when I got some garbage on the serial line from plugging and
unplugging the serial cable, so I am wondering if there is an alternate
character set thing going on??

Thanks,

John Eddy
“Colin Burgess” <> cburgess@qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:bageda$o3q$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
I think that pterm has a ‘terminal’ font?

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy



\

cburgess@qnx.com

5

Someone once gave me this sequence for testing whether you can draw line
characters on your screen:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
printf("\033(0"); //Init ANSI mode or something like that
printf("\164\161\161\n"); //print some lines
printf("\033(B"); //return to ‘normal’ mode
return 0;
}

Don’t know if that’s any help.

cheers,

Kris

“John Eddy” <john.h.eddy@lmco.com> wrote in message
news:bag5uq$k3i$1@inn.qnx.com…

I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port (so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display them
in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df. This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy

6

Derek,

I tried dumping my test file in pterm with all of these fonts selected. none
of them showed the line drawing characters in the right place for a standard
IBM PC ROM character set.

Mabe I am running pterm in the wrong mode??

Kris Warkentin suggested putting the terminal into ansi mode with an escape
sequence to draw line drawing characters. That is fine, but not want I need.
I tried it, and the line drawing characters show up shifted to the area from
0x6A to 0x78. That is in the lower case character area on the normal
character set.

Problem is… I need the line drawing characters to be in the normal 8 bit
code mapping for the PC. The bios of the board is outputting those codes,
and I am just displaying what it sends with qtalk in a pterm window.

This does explain how I got the funky line drawing set that messed with me
before while I was plugging and unplugging the cable though.

Thanks,

John Eddy

“Derek Leach” <dleach@qnx.com> wrote in message
news:baijo4$bv5$1@nntp.qnx.com…

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
I tried it, and it does not map the line drawing characters right.

There is one called term and one called pc term. Neither of these works.

The following fonts;

PC Term
PC Serif
PC Sanserif

are in IBM437 encoding.
term maps to PC Term.

Regards.

I have seen the screen start outputting line drawing characters (when it
shouldn’t) when I got some garbage on the serial line from plugging and
unplugging the serial cable, so I am wondering if there is an alternate
character set thing going on??

Thanks,

John Eddy
“Colin Burgess” <> cburgess@qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:bageda$o3q$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
I think that pterm has a ‘terminal’ font?

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch
to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The
lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my
borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy



\

cburgess@qnx.com

7

Kris,

Ok, this gives me line drawing characters, but not what I need.
I need the line drawing characters to show up in the upper 128 characters of
a 256 character (8bit) map, like it does on a PC’s screen.

I am using qtalk to see the serial bios display of a board, I can’t
translate the characters on the fly (unless you know a secret way).

Does this mean I need a font editor to do this??

Does anybody have one handy that works in Qnx 6.2.1?

Thanks,

John

“Kris Warkentin” <kewarken@qnx.com> wrote in message
news:baiq0e$k13$1@nntp.qnx.com…

Someone once gave me this sequence for testing whether you can draw line
characters on your screen:

#include <stdio.h

int main(void) {
printf("\033(0"); //Init ANSI mode or something like that
printf("\164\161\161\n"); //print some lines
printf("\033(B"); //return to ‘normal’ mode
return 0;
}

Don’t know if that’s any help.

cheers,

Kris

“John Eddy” <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote in message
news:bag5uq$k3i$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them
in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy
\

8

The line drawing characters start at 0xB3 in IBM437 encoding, and around 0x2500
in Unicode. If you want to emulate DOS’s character swapping in the upper 128
characters, you need to make your own font.

You will need to create a Unicode BDF,
and place your box symbols in the upper 128 character range. You will need to
select this font explicitly for this to work. After you have your BDF file, use
bdftoph2 (QNX6) or bdf_2_phf (QNX4) to make your PHF font. Remember, one bdf
file per point size i.e. myfont12.bdf converts to myfont12.phf, myfont13.bdf converts
to myfont13.phf.

Good luck.

John Eddy <john.h.eddy@lmco.com> wrote:

Kris,

Ok, this gives me line drawing characters, but not what I need.
I need the line drawing characters to show up in the upper 128 characters of
a 256 character (8bit) map, like it does on a PC’s screen.

I am using qtalk to see the serial bios display of a board, I can’t
translate the characters on the fly (unless you know a secret way).

Does this mean I need a font editor to do this??

Does anybody have one handy that works in Qnx 6.2.1?

Thanks,

John

“Kris Warkentin” <> kewarken@qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:baiq0e$k13$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
Someone once gave me this sequence for testing whether you can draw line
characters on your screen:

#include <stdio.h

int main(void) {
printf("\033(0"); //Init ANSI mode or something like that
printf("\164\161\161\n"); //print some lines
printf("\033(B"); //return to ‘normal’ mode
return 0;
}

Don’t know if that’s any help.

cheers,

Kris

“John Eddy” <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote in message
news:bag5uq$k3i$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them
in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy
\

9

Ok, so does anyone out there have a font editor I can use to do this?
Or perhaps know of an existing BDF font that will fit the bill?

Thanks,

John Eddy

“Derek Leach” <dleach@dleach.qnx.com> wrote in message
news:bal5m2$f1s$1@nntp.qnx.com…

The line drawing characters start at 0xB3 in IBM437 encoding, and around
0x2500
in Unicode. If you want to emulate DOS’s character swapping in the upper
128
characters, you need to make your own font.

You will need to create a Unicode BDF,
and place your box symbols in the upper 128 character range. You will
need to
select this font explicitly for this to work. After you have your BDF
file, use
bdftoph2 (QNX6) or bdf_2_phf (QNX4) to make your PHF font. Remember, one
bdf
file per point size i.e. myfont12.bdf converts to myfont12.phf,
myfont13.bdf converts
to myfont13.phf.

Good luck.

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
Kris,

Ok, this gives me line drawing characters, but not what I need.
I need the line drawing characters to show up in the upper 128
characters of
a 256 character (8bit) map, like it does on a PC’s screen.

I am using qtalk to see the serial bios display of a board, I can’t
translate the characters on the fly (unless you know a secret way).

Does this mean I need a font editor to do this??

Does anybody have one handy that works in Qnx 6.2.1?

Thanks,

John

“Kris Warkentin” <> kewarken@qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:baiq0e$k13$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
Someone once gave me this sequence for testing whether you can draw
line
characters on your screen:

#include <stdio.h

int main(void) {
printf("\033(0"); //Init ANSI mode or something like that
printf("\164\161\161\n"); //print some lines
printf("\033(B"); //return to ‘normal’ mode
return 0;
}

Don’t know if that’s any help.

cheers,

Kris

“John Eddy” <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote in message
news:bag5uq$k3i$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch
to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them
in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The
lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my
borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy


\

10

John Eddy <john.h.eddy@lmco.com> wrote:

Ok, so does anyone out there have a font editor I can use to do this?
Or perhaps know of an existing BDF font that will fit the bill?

Thanks,

John Eddy

Well BDF files are just ASCII representations, so you could use
‘vi’ to edit/make them. You should be able to find a ‘dos’ bdf
file by searching on the net. You could also try www.unicode.org,
d/load a bunch of bdfs, and change to symbols you require.

Regards.

“Derek Leach” <> dleach@dleach.qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:bal5m2$f1s$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
The line drawing characters start at 0xB3 in IBM437 encoding, and around
0x2500
in Unicode. If you want to emulate DOS’s character swapping in the upper
128
characters, you need to make your own font.

You will need to create a Unicode BDF,
and place your box symbols in the upper 128 character range. You will
need to
select this font explicitly for this to work. After you have your BDF
file, use
bdftoph2 (QNX6) or bdf_2_phf (QNX4) to make your PHF font. Remember, one
bdf
file per point size i.e. myfont12.bdf converts to myfont12.phf,
myfont13.bdf converts
to myfont13.phf.

Good luck.

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
Kris,

Ok, this gives me line drawing characters, but not what I need.
I need the line drawing characters to show up in the upper 128
characters of
a 256 character (8bit) map, like it does on a PC’s screen.

I am using qtalk to see the serial bios display of a board, I can’t
translate the characters on the fly (unless you know a secret way).

Does this mean I need a font editor to do this??

Does anybody have one handy that works in Qnx 6.2.1?

Thanks,

John

“Kris Warkentin” <> kewarken@qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:baiq0e$k13$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
Someone once gave me this sequence for testing whether you can draw
line
characters on your screen:

#include <stdio.h

int main(void) {
printf("\033(0"); //Init ANSI mode or something like that
printf("\164\161\161\n"); //print some lines
printf("\033(B"); //return to ‘normal’ mode
return 0;
}

Don’t know if that’s any help.

cheers,

Kris

“John Eddy” <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote in message
news:bag5uq$k3i$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
I have a pc-104 system that outputs the bios menus over a serial port
(so
you don’t need a vga card), but I see garbage for the line drawing
characters.

I created a file with the right number of characters and used spatch
to
give
me a sequence from 0x20 to 0xFF, and used “cat chars.txt” to display
them
in
the pterm window, but I don’t see the line drawing characters. The
lines
for
8X and 9X are blank.

Terminal font on a pc has the line drawing characters from b3 to df.
This
area in my test dump has characters that keep showing up in my
borders
(like
the A with a sideways colon above it).

What do I need to do to get the right translation?

Is there a font editor or another font I can download, or select that
will
work??

Thanks,

John Eddy


\

11

Also, post on comp.os.qnx, I believe Igor has a font editor.

Derek Leach <dleach@qnx.com> wrote:

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
Ok, so does anyone out there have a font editor I can use to do this?
Or perhaps know of an existing BDF font that will fit the bill?

Thanks,

John Eddy

Well BDF files are just ASCII representations, so you could use
‘vi’ to edit/make them. You should be able to find a ‘dos’ bdf
file by searching on the net. You could also try > www.unicode.org> ,
d/load a bunch of bdfs, and change to symbols you require.

Regards.
[snip]

12

Derek Leach <dleach@qnx.com> wrote:

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
Ok, so does anyone out there have a font editor I can use to do this?
Or perhaps know of an existing BDF font that will fit the bill?

Well BDF files are just ASCII representations, so you could use
‘vi’ to edit/make them. You should be able to find a ‘dos’ bdf
file by searching on the net. You could also try > www.unicode.org> ,
d/load a bunch of bdfs, and change to symbols you require.

This has gone in the wrong direction. Messing with your fonts is a
really bad way of solving this.

Your problem is that by default, pterm emulates the ANSI terminal
protocol, which assumes that the characters you write to the terminal
use the ISO 8859-1 encoding, and translates them to the encoding that
your terminal fonts use (IBM437 by default). Characters in the range
0x80 through 0x9F aren’t displayed at all because they’re considered
control characters in the ANSI terminal protocol. Since the ISO
character set doesn’t contain any linedrawing characters, the only way
to display them is by using an escape sequence that switches character
sets. Typically, programs use an old VT100 escape sequence that allows
you to do linedrawing even on a 7-bit connection.

The simplest way to solve your problem is by running your pterm with the
old QNX terminal protocol (pterm -Q). In this mode, pterm assumes that
terminal output uses the same encoding as the font (IBM437 by default),
and doesn’t do any translation.

Another, more general way of doing linedrawing is by using a terminal
library (like ncurses) that uses a database of terminal descriptions to
find out how to do linedrawing depending on the terminal type you’re
connected to. This would allow you to display correctly on any
supported terminal (including pterm in the default mode), provided that
you know the protocol it emulates.

13

Wojtek Lerch <wojtek_l@yahoo.ca> wrote:
[snip]

This has gone in the wrong direction. Messing with your fonts is a
really bad way of solving this.

Your problem is that by default, pterm emulates the ANSI terminal
protocol, which assumes that the characters you write to the terminal
use the ISO 8859-1 encoding, and translates them to the encoding that
your terminal fonts use (IBM437 by default). Characters in the range
0x80 through 0x9F aren’t displayed at all because they’re considered
control characters in the ANSI terminal protocol. Since the ISO
character set doesn’t contain any linedrawing characters, the only way
to display them is by using an escape sequence that switches character
sets. Typically, programs use an old VT100 escape sequence that allows
you to do linedrawing even on a 7-bit connection.

The simplest way to solve your problem is by running your pterm with the
old QNX terminal protocol (pterm -Q). In this mode, pterm assumes that
terminal output uses the same encoding as the font (IBM437 by default),
and doesn’t do any translation.

Another, more general way of doing linedrawing is by using a terminal
library (like ncurses) that uses a database of terminal descriptions to
find out how to do linedrawing depending on the terminal type you’re
connected to. This would allow you to display correctly on any
supported terminal (including pterm in the default mode), provided that
you know the protocol it emulates.

See what happens when you go on vacation! :wink:

14

Wojtek Lerch,

Ok, I tried opening pterm with -Q and running qtalk in it with the bios
screen being updated… It was worse than opening things the default way.

The bios is outputting ANSI commands to move to the beginning of a line
before it outputs the characters on that line. These escape sequences are
not translated right when I use -Q. I can’t tell if the line drawing
characters are there or not, because everything gets underlined and bolded,
and scrolls down the page rapidly (updates at 115200 bps).

The line drawing characters look good and even the colors look right when I
use hyperterm to view this bios output, but I get jumping due to the fact
that it is outputting 80 X 25 and hyperterm only handles 24 lines. Also, I
don’t really want to have to run in windows.

I don’t get the scrolling/jumping in qtalk, but the line drawing and the
colors are gone. I was just hoping there was a quick fix for this, but it is
getting way too involved. I don’t want to have to define my own font, or
write my own terminal program just to see the line drawing characters. I
just wanted to know how to set up qtalk or some other already existing
terminal program to see the characters correctly.

Thanks,

John Eddy

“Wojtek Lerch” <wojtek_l@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:bc28a0$1au$1@inn.qnx.com…

Derek Leach <> dleach@qnx.com> > wrote:
John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
Ok, so does anyone out there have a font editor I can use to do this?
Or perhaps know of an existing BDF font that will fit the bill?

Well BDF files are just ASCII representations, so you could use
‘vi’ to edit/make them. You should be able to find a ‘dos’ bdf
file by searching on the net. You could also try > www.unicode.org> ,
d/load a bunch of bdfs, and change to symbols you require.

This has gone in the wrong direction. Messing with your fonts is a
really bad way of solving this.

Your problem is that by default, pterm emulates the ANSI terminal
protocol, which assumes that the characters you write to the terminal
use the ISO 8859-1 encoding, and translates them to the encoding that
your terminal fonts use (IBM437 by default). Characters in the range
0x80 through 0x9F aren’t displayed at all because they’re considered
control characters in the ANSI terminal protocol. Since the ISO
character set doesn’t contain any linedrawing characters, the only way
to display them is by using an escape sequence that switches character
sets. Typically, programs use an old VT100 escape sequence that allows
you to do linedrawing even on a 7-bit connection.

The simplest way to solve your problem is by running your pterm with the
old QNX terminal protocol (pterm -Q). In this mode, pterm assumes that
terminal output uses the same encoding as the font (IBM437 by default),
and doesn’t do any translation.

Another, more general way of doing linedrawing is by using a terminal
library (like ncurses) that uses a database of terminal descriptions to
find out how to do linedrawing depending on the terminal type you’re
connected to. This would allow you to display correctly on any
supported terminal (including pterm in the default mode), provided that
you know the protocol it emulates.

15

John Eddy <john.h.eddy@lmco.com> wrote:

Ok, I tried opening pterm with -Q and running qtalk in it with the bios
screen being updated… It was worse than opening things the default way.

The bios is outputting ANSI commands to move to the beginning of a line
before it outputs the characters on that line. These escape sequences are
not translated right when I use -Q. I can’t tell if the line drawing
characters are there or not, because everything gets underlined and bolded,
and scrolls down the page rapidly (updates at 115200 bps).

Ah. So your BIOS assumes that the terminal it talks to understands ANSI
escape sequences but maps all of the upper 128 character codes to the PC
character set. Sorry, I’m afraid we don’t have a terminal emulator that
does both.

The line drawing characters look good and even the colors look right when I
use hyperterm to view this bios output, but I get jumping due to the fact
that it is outputting 80 X 25 and hyperterm only handles 24 lines. Also, I
don’t really want to have to run in windows.

I don’t get the scrolling/jumping in qtalk, but the line drawing and the
colors are gone. I was just hoping there was a quick fix for this, but it is
getting way too involved. I don’t want to have to define my own font, or
write my own terminal program just to see the line drawing characters. I
just wanted to know how to set up qtalk or some other already existing
terminal program to see the characters correctly.

This has nothing to do with qtalk: qtalk just reads bytes from the
serial port and writes them to the terminal. You don’t even really need
qtalk – you could run pterm directly on the serial port with a very
similar result (pterm -d /dev/ser1). It’s pterm that interprets the
bytes you write to the terminal and decides which ones are control
characters and which ones should be displayed in Photon and which
Unicode values to map them to when they’re displayed.

You could try to insert a program between the serial port and pterm
(using a pipe and pterm’s -D option), and translate bytes above 128 to
ANSI linedrawing escape sequences in that program. Or, even better, you
could write it as a Photon program with a PtTty widget in it, and do the
translation in the Pt_CB_TTY_OUTPUT callback. It would be much simpler
than writing your own terminal program from scratch…

16

I had actually throught about doing it in photon, or writing a translation
routine, but by now I don’t think they will let me charge anymore time to
this minor issue.

I did find a version of hyperterm on the hillgrave (original maker of
hyperterm) site. Hyperterm Private Edition is a free download for
non-commercial use. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do much more than allow
you to adjust the number of rows and columns compared to the standard
windows version. It looks to me like the version they allow windows to
incorporate is intentionally limited so people have to go to them for an
“upgrade”. I swear I remember seeing that option to change the rows and
columns in an earlier verion of windows, I just can’t remember which one it
was.

Thanks,

John Eddy

“Wojtek Lerch” <wojtek_l@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:bcsnnm$6ib$1@inn.qnx.com…

John Eddy <> john.h.eddy@lmco.com> > wrote:
Ok, I tried opening pterm with -Q and running qtalk in it with the bios
screen being updated… It was worse than opening things the default
way.

The bios is outputting ANSI commands to move to the beginning of a line
before it outputs the characters on that line. These escape sequences
are
not translated right when I use -Q. I can’t tell if the line drawing
characters are there or not, because everything gets underlined and
bolded,
and scrolls down the page rapidly (updates at 115200 bps).

Ah. So your BIOS assumes that the terminal it talks to understands ANSI
escape sequences but maps all of the upper 128 character codes to the PC
character set. Sorry, I’m afraid we don’t have a terminal emulator that
does both.

The line drawing characters look good and even the colors look right
when I
use hyperterm to view this bios output, but I get jumping due to the
fact
that it is outputting 80 X 25 and hyperterm only handles 24 lines. Also,
I
don’t really want to have to run in windows.

I don’t get the scrolling/jumping in qtalk, but the line drawing and the
colors are gone. I was just hoping there was a quick fix for this, but
it is
getting way too involved. I don’t want to have to define my own font, or
write my own terminal program just to see the line drawing characters. I
just wanted to know how to set up qtalk or some other already existing
terminal program to see the characters correctly.

This has nothing to do with qtalk: qtalk just reads bytes from the
serial port and writes them to the terminal. You don’t even really need
qtalk – you could run pterm directly on the serial port with a very
similar result (pterm -d /dev/ser1). It’s pterm that interprets the
bytes you write to the terminal and decides which ones are control
characters and which ones should be displayed in Photon and which
Unicode values to map them to when they’re displayed.

You could try to insert a program between the serial port and pterm
(using a pipe and pterm’s -D option), and translate bytes above 128 to
ANSI linedrawing escape sequences in that program. Or, even better, you
could write it as a Photon program with a PtTty widget in it, and do the
translation in the Pt_CB_TTY_OUTPUT callback. It would be much simpler
than writing your own terminal program from scratch…