(TXT) View source
       
       # 2025-05-25 - AlphaSmart 3000 And Unicode
       
 (TXT) AlphaSmart (Wikipedia)
       
       Recently i bought two inexpensive AlphaSmart 3000's at the thrift
       store.  They are in good condition.  I updated them to the last
       firmware, which took some doing.  I replaced the CR2032 cells.
       
       These were made in the USA and are said to have durable construction.
       The manual specifies that it can run for 700 hours on 3 AA batteries.
       They hold 100 pages of text. These are glorified electric typewriters,
       more suitable for the Noosphere than for jacking into cyberspace.
       
       They connect to a PC as a PS2 or USB keyboard.  After pressing the
       SEND key, the screen shows a progress bar while it "types" the
       document into the current window, like a player piano.  In theory the
       printer port can send over RS-232 but i couldn't find pinout
       documentation.
       
 (HTM) AlphaSmart 3000 User Guide
       
 (HTM) AlphaSmart System 3 Update Guide
       
       Some Greek and Latin symbols exist, but they do not work out of the
       box in DOS nor in Linux.  Symbols are sent by "typing" CP1252
       Alt-codes.  These would work correctly in Windows, but in DOS they
       result in spurious characters.
       
 (TXT) Alt-codes
       
       For example, if i type recipe text below:
       
           Preheat oven to 350°F and sauté onions...
       
       On the AlphaSmart, i would type Alt-Shift-8 for the DEGREE SYMBOL and
       Alt-E, then the letter e for the LOWERCASE E ACUTE SYMBOL, and the
       LCD displays the text as i would expect.
       
       When i press the Send button, the AlphaSmart sends Alt-0176 for the
       degree symbol and Alt-0233 for the lowercase e acute symbol.  On a
       DOS PC using CP437, this results in the LIGHT SHADE character and the
       GREEK CAPITAL LETTER THETA as shown below:
       
           Preheat oven to 350░F and sautΘ onions...
       
       I wrote an AWK script to convert these mis-encoded characters to
       \uXXXX escape sequences, which can be decoded by utf8tocp 0.9.5r5.
       
 (DIR) utf8tocp 0.9.5r5
       
 (TXT) astouni.awk
       
       Suppose i save the AlphaSmart text into a file named recipe.as3 and
       run my AWK script.
       
           C:\>mawk -f astouni.awk recipe.as3 >recipe.uni
       
       Now the file named recipe.uni will contain the text below:
       
           Preheat oven to 350\u00B0F and saut\u00E9 onions...
       
       I can use utf8tocp to convert this to UTF-8 like so:
       
           C:\>utf8tocp -r 437 recipe.uni recipe.txt
       
       Now recipe.txt contains the UTF-8 text below:
       
           Preheat oven to 350°F and sauté onions...
       
       See also:
       
 (HTM) Writing On The AlphaSmart 3000 by pgadey
       
       tags: bencollver,retrocomputing,technical
       
       # Tags
       
 (DIR) bencollver
 (DIR) retrocomputing
 (DIR) technical