2025-05-25 - AlphaSmart 3000 And Unicode
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AlphaSmart (Wikipedia)
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gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/AlphaSmart>
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.
AlphaSmart 3000 User Guide
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/details/manualzilla-id-7405474>
AlphaSmart System 3 Update Guide
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/details/manualzilla-id-7337681>
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.
Alt-codes
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gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Alt_code>
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.
utf8tocp 0.9.5r5
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/files/dos/util/utf8tocp/>
astouni.awk
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gopher://tilde.pink/0/~bencollver/log/
2025-05-25-alphasmart-3000-and-unicode/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...
tags: bencollver,retrocomputing,technical
Tags
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bencollver
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/tag/bencollver/>
retrocomputing
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/tag/retrocomputing/>
technical
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/tag/technical/>