Re: Once more, on Nota Bene Lingua characters

[Robert Hemenway robhem@xxxxxxxx]

To Emery Snyder--

A little more about the Lingua characters. You asked if there would be
difficulty converting NB Lingua files to other formats.

I looked at a file, which I might have done before. (Sorry.) So far as I
could see on a quick look, NB Lingua makes use only of the 256 character
slots in the 2-bit array--no 3-bit characters--and has its own proprietary
files for the Times Roman fonts in binary code, one for each font size in
each language: Roman, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic. The screen fonts in Nota
Bene show the Greek or Hebrew characters; in extended view the characters
are Roman and gibberish, pretty much. The Greek alpha is called with the
"a" key, displays as an alpha, and prints out, using NB's Greek font, as an
alpha. In extended view, it's just a plain old "a."

So you should be able to write fairly quickly--or, perhaps, find
somewhere-- search-and-replace routines that convert an NB Lingua file to
another word processor's format. Nota Bene may make them available, for all
I know. If you're dealing with only the fairly limited range of diacritics
for the Eastern European languages and Turkish, writing your own should be
a breeze.

Don't take my word for any of this. I haven't worked closely with NB for
some years. A more authoritative answer may appear here--or ask Nota Bene.

Regards,

Robert Hemenway