Dave Johnson Brown University Computer Science ddj%brown@csnet-
relay.ARPA {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,ulysses,linus}!brunix!ddj
=================== Here's an informal description of the HQX
format as I understand it: ----- The first and last characters
are each a ':'. After the first ':', the rest of the file is
just string of 6 bit encoded characters. All newlines and
carriage returns are to be ignored. The tricky part is that
there are holes in the translation string so you have to look up
each file character to get its binary 6 bit value. I found the
string by looking at a hex dump of BinHex:
!"#$%&'()*+,-012345689@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNPQRSTUVXYZ[`abcdefhijklmpqr
I can't see how this aids or abets any kind of error recovery,
but if you ran into a char not in the list, you would know
something's wrong and give up. There is some run length
encoding, where the character to be repeated is followed by a
0x90 byte then the repeat count. For example, ff9004 means
repeat 0xff 4 times. The special case of a repeat count of zero