COMPUNIGMA CONVERTOR 1.0

Compunigma Convertor 1.0 is a simple byte-converter application designed specifically to smooth-out the many inconveniences that the Armenian font designers have created for us, namely the encoding chaos that is currently the norm in the usage of the Armenian alphabet on computers.

While over the years the ARMSCII standard has been generalized in Armenia and the Diaspora, many other encoding schemes are still doing quite well, specially the various flavours of the Arasan font and its derivatives on Windows. In the Mac world, the confusion is even more pronounced, and, until all software and font packages adhere to the unicode standard, the confusion will keep reigning and make life miserable for those who are cought in the middle.

WHAT DOES THE CONVERTOR DO?

The Compunigma Convertor simply takes one or many text files written in any encoding and translates the contents to another encoding. The current version is confined to byte-length characters and thus does not support the Unicode standard (for Unicode to ARMSCII or vice-versa conversion, use our other convertor, the Compunigma ARMSCII to Unicode Converter 1.0 ). To keep the process (and the software) simple, it does not check for formatting characters — it simply applies the conversion algorithm to every byte of the file—, and may produce unexpected results if a full formatted word processor file is fed to it. It prefers files that are saved as text-only.

On the other hand, Convertor has virtually no limitations on the number of files it can process in one operation, nor does it have any limitation on the length of the files it can process (in both cases, the limit is over 2 billion items).

TECHNICALS

Installation

Download the convertor.zip file and save it on your computer. Unzip it, and you're in business.

Compunigma Convertor 1.0 does not need any installation. Just copy the executable on your computer and run it. On its first run, it will create three folders in the folder that the executable is in: Tables, Working and Logs. As the names imply, Tables is the folder where the conversion tables will reside, Working is where you can put the files you want to convert and Logs is where log files are written by the application. It will also create an INI file where information about the whereabouts of the three above-mentioned folders are written. The INI file is a simple text-file and you can edit it in Notepad to change the various locations to suit your installation.

The current distribution of Compunigma Convertor is a zipped file containing this .PDF file and a folder named Conversion. The folder contains the Convertor executable, the three necessary folders and four table files in the Tables folder. Our suggestion is to copy the Conversion folder somewhere handy (like your desktop) and create a link for the executable.

Operation

You can select files to convert from anywhere on your computer. It is not necessary that they be in the Working folder. The converted files are given the prefix “Cn_” where n is an incremental number. Convertor never overwrites a file: it increments the prefix and creates a new file.

Once your list of files is selected, you select the correct table to use for the conversion, then click on the [Run batch] button. That's it.

The tables

The conversion tables used by the Compunigma Convertor 1.0 are simple text files. The first line of the file is a description line, and it's what you see to the right of the tables list when you select a table. The remaining lines contain the values in the form :

Source Code = Target Code

For example : the First Armenian letter (Ayp) has the code 178 in the ARMSCII encoding, while it is 65 in some Arasan font (there are varieties of them). A table converting from Arasan to ARMSCII would thus contain the line:

065 = 178

You can write your own conversion tables using a simple notepad. Just follow the above guidelines and give it a meaningful name ending with the .TBL suffix. Once copied to the Tables folder, the program automatically recognizes it.