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	# 2025-05-25 - AlphaSmart 3000 And Unicode

	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.

	AlphaSmart 3000 User Guide

	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.

	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.

	utf8tocp 0.9.5r5

	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

	bencollver
	retrocomputing
	technical