Old days are catching up and old stuff isn't as good as new. Have tons of data stored in a system that only supports printing to ESC/P2 printer language, and even if that isn't completely unsupported, I want to be able to convert the printouts.
The datastorage is a properitary file. I have decoded some of the fileformat, but still there is too many blanks to successfully recreating the stored data.
The software is written in Forth. Tried to debug it, but it's too timeconsuming without a better decompiler. Any pointers...?
At last, the easy way out is to grab the printout stream and decode it into bitmaps and then create a PDF or something. Even if ESC/P2 is older I havent found a good library for it. Any pointers?
If anyone has suggestions to what path to walk I'd be very happy. Oh, and any software I write to solve this will be written in C#. :)
Related
I am having a hard time to load a textfile into a stringlist in firemonkey on osx when the encoding of the textfile in not known.
When I just use list.loadfromfile(filename), I get most of the time an exception regarding encoding.
list.loadfromfile(filename,TEncoding.unicode) will also fail when the file is in ansi, and opposite.
There is no issue on Windows, list.loadfromfile(filename) just works, but not on osx.
I cant specify the encoding, because it will be unknown (user provide the text files).
Any clue how I can get around this encoding issue when running the app on a mac?
In general this is not possible. It is quite possible to create a single file that is valid when interpreted in all common encodings. This has been discussed many times, for instance: The Notepad file encoding problem, redux.
I'm assuming that you are working with files that do not contain byte order marks, BOMs. Obviously if your input files contained BOMs then you could simply check the BOM and be done.
With that assumption stated, the right solution to the problem, in a perfect world, is to know the encoding. Either pick a specific encoding which your program requires, or arrange for the user to tell you the encoding when they supply the file.
If, for whatever reason, you cannot do that then the next best thing to do is to use heuristics to attempt to guess the encoding used. I'm not aware of any Pascal code to do this. But you should be able to put something together that will work reasonably well. This answer gives an outline of a basic strategy: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20747074
Context
A friend of mine is having trouble printing source code to a human readable format.
The compiled (I assume) programs of their welding robot have the .rpg extension. They want to collect print-outs in human-readable format, possibly for backup or future reference.
Their supplier can provide the software that accomplishes this, be it at a considerable cost (and possibly: an annual license). Because of this, my friend decided to ask me if a easier/cheaper solution exists.
Examples & Pictures
The files can be read on the console of the robot, an example:
I've done some minor research and I'm fairly sure this is the Report Program Generator (RPG) language developed by IBM. The Assembly-like syntax seems to match; it might be one of the later versions of the language.
My friend has send me an example .rpg file, the contents seem binary with some string literals scattered throughout. Screenshot of the contents of an example file in hexadecimal:
The Question
There is not much, if any, clear information to be found online so I suppose I have multiple questions (for anyone that might know more about this):
Is this (first image) Report Program Generator (RPG) code?
Does the .rpg file contain compiled or processed code? Maybe an intermediate format?
Is it possible to convert files as shown in the example, back to source-code or human-readable format, kind of 'disassemble' it?
If anyone knows more, don't hesitate to give me any information or ask more details if necessary. Thanks in advance!
And maybe not an important question but still something that bugs me (and might indicate I'm on the wrong track):
If this is indeed an RPG program, why would the compiled/processed binary have the .rpg extension, shouldn't the source-file have that? This leads me to believe I'm either (a) assuming the wrong things (the language, etc...) or (b) this is an intermediate format, easier for machines to read, that has to be interpreted by some kind of runtime system.
I don't think that's any version of IBM's RPG language. RPG does have a MOVEL opcode, but it doesn't have any of the others.
Also, all the versions of the IBM language have been intended for business programming. I doubt that it would have been used for robotics.
My guess is that's a proprietary language of the company that makes the robot.
There are some similarities but it does not look like IBM RPG language.
RPG sources are in fact source physical file members. They are not stored in the "traditional" file system but in OS/400 libraries. Therefore RPG sources have no extension. They can be converted to Integrated File System stream file though.
I can't answer this question I'm afraid as it's unknown language to me.
I expect possibly that the OP misidentifies the file type/extension; that the extension is actually .prg, and the files serve as instructions for a Panasonic Industrial Welding Robot. The following forum [drilled down to Panasonic Robots] bills itself as the biggest Industrial Robots Supportforum worldwide!; perhaps a good place to ask about those images provided in the OP, and the inquiry about getting source from what appears to be a binary instruction stream.
FWiW, the first image seems to show that the Ezed utility [on the console] gives that human-readable format, so then the question might be how to get that saved and then how to transfer that elsewhere; e.g. what type of comm ports and file transfer utilities are available from whatever platform/OS.
I want record screen (by capturing 15 screenshots per second). This part I know how to do. But I don't know how to write this to some popular video format. Best option which I found is write frames to separated PNG files and use commandline Mencoder which can convert them to many output formats. But maybe someone have another idea?
Requirements:
Must be multi-platform solutions (I'm using Free Pascal / Lazarus). Windows, Linux, MacOS
Exists some librarys for that?
Could be complex commandline application which record screen for me too, but I must have possibility to edit frames before converting whole raw data to popular video format
All materials which could give me some idea are appreciated. API, librarys, anything even in other languages than FPC (I would try rewrite it or find some equivalent)
I considered also writting frames to video RAW format and then use Mencoder (he can handle it) or other solution, but can't find any API/doc for video RAW data
Regards
Argalatyr mentioned ffmpeg already.
There are two ways that you can get that to work:
By spawning an new process. All you have to do is prepare the right input (could be a series of jpeg images for example), and the right commandline parameters. After that you just call ffmpeg.exe and wait for it to finish.
ffmpeg makes use of some dll's that do the actual work. You can use those dll's directly from within your Delphi application. It's a bit more work, because it's more low-level, but in the end it'll give you a finer control over what happens, and what you show the user while you're processing.
Here are some solutions to check out:
FFVCL Commercial. Actually looks quite good, but I was too greedy to spend money on this.
Open Source Delphi headers for FFMpeg. I've tried it, but I never managed to get it to work.
I ended up pulling the DLL wrappers from an open source karaoke program (UltraStar Deluxe). I had to remove some dependencies, but in the end it worked like a charm. The relevant (pascal) code can be found here:
http://ultrastardx.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ultrastardx/trunk/src/lib/ffmpeg-0.10/
There was some earlier discussion with a Delphi component here. It's a very simple component that sometimes generates some weird movies. Maybe a start.
I am trying to deserialize an old file format that was serialized in Delphi, it uses binary seralization. I know nothing about the structure of the file except some very high level records that are in it.
What steps would you take to solve this problem? Any tools etc?
A good hexeditor, and use the gray matter to identify structures.
If you get a hint what kind of file it is, you can search for more specialized tools.
Running the unix/Linux "file" command can be good too (*) See Barry's comment below for how it works. It can be a quick check for common filetypes like DBF,ZIP etc hidden by using a different extension.
(*) there are 3rd party builds for windows, but they might lag in versions. If you can do it on a recent *nix distro, it is advised to do so.
The serialization process simply loops over all published properties and streams their value to a text file. If you do not know the exact classes that were streamed to the file you will have a very hard time deserializing the file. (if not impossible)
A good hex editor is first. If the file is read without buffering (eg read directly from a TFileStream) you could gain some information when using ProcMon from SysInternals; You can see exactly what data is read in what chunks and thus determine more quickly where the boundaries are between the structures you already identified.
I need to generate a report/printout programmatically.
My app currently uses FastReport to build a report, consisting of text, images, tables etc.
It does not bind to any database. Everything is built programmatically.
However, the finished report does not look the same in PDF and RTF, and the old code is generally very complicated.
Are there any better tools to programmatically make a printout or report? Preferably one that outputs PDF and DOC.
In my opinion you've already got the best! I've used QuickReports, Piparti (early ReportBuilder), Crystal(!) and ReportBuilder and I've written a few reports by sending commands direct to the printer. As far as I'm concerned FastReport is much better (although I haven't tried Rave - nor will I).
Is it a recent version of FR? The PDF output for us is fine.
They have some good examples of writing reports through code on their website I believe and if you're looking at re-writing all the reports in A.N.Other reporting product why not, instead, use the opportunity to re-write the reports in a more maintainable way using FR? (Assuming that's possible, of course). Perhaps a cleaner approach to the code of the report generation will make it easier for the FR converter to create the RTF/DOC output...
I've never had much luck generating decent RTF versions of reports from commercial report writers. The only decent output I got was through lovingly hand coding every report using hundreds of '{','}' and '\' and spending days reading the RTF specs. Never again!
A lot of it appears to be down to the order you add the text/lines/fonts/styles etc to the report and the RTF generator can find it difficult to get the best rendering - I think.
You can try Rave Reports.
It has built in components to generate PDF, RTF and HTML documents.
And also it comes free.
For non-database printing needs, FastReport already works (code-based reporting), but for direct printing of Documents you could consider the very-thorough ExpressPrintingSystem from developer express, which is a true delphi printing system, not a reporting system.
Also if you need to create a print documents, almost like a word processor, and then print those word-processor-like documents, consider TRichView. It supports .DOC files, something you asked about.
Some day you might need a banded-report generator again and if you do, FastReport really is the best.