Golden Gale ARJ format

[Patricia]

I've found a rare public domain book that I would like to convert. The bad news is that it is in something called Golden Gale Archive format and has an ARJ file extension.
I unzipped the folder which contains several files with TCO and DCO extensions, plus an exe file, which turned out to be a Dos-based reader. (How surprised I was when my mouse stopped working. Then I got the hang of it. And the book is beautifully formatted.)
Is there any relatively straightforward way of converting this to text, Doc or HTML, or any format recognised by Book Designer or Calibre?

[igorsk]

Link or upload, I'll have a look.

[Patricia]

Thanks Igor
Frederick William Rolfe: Stories Toto Told Me
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu...fe&amode=words

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Thanks Igor
Frederick William Rolfe: Stories Toto Told Me
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu...fe&amode=words

Patricia, it's possible to dump the book to a text file, though the non-registered version of the viewer requires doing so a section at a time and combining the pieces. I'm doing so now, and should have a file you can work from in a bit.
______
Dennis

[igorsk]

Well, they use a quite complicated algorithm for compressing the text, so making an automatic extractor is not easy. I did, however, find a way to disable the three-page check for text copying and extracted it all (sans notes).

[Patricia]

That is amazing. Thank you, Igor. I am very grateful.

[igorsk]

BTW just for your information, ARJ is a file compression format (was popular in early 90s) and is separate from "Golden Gate" the book series name. At first I thought you found some exotic variation of an arj archive

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by igorsk

BTW just for your information, ARJ is a file compression format (was popular in early 90s) and is separate from "Golden Gate" the book series name. At first I thought you found some exotic variation of an arj archive

I hadn't seen an ARJ archive in years. I still have the DOS version of ARJ around, but it's a format 7zip knows how to extract, so I could open it.

The author of ARJ used to be a participant on a BBS network where I moderated an assortment of message areas. Ah, the good old days...
_____
Dennis

[llasram]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Well, they use a quite complicated algorithm for compressing the text, so making an automatic extractor is not easy. I did, however, find a way to disable the three-page check for text copying and extracted it all (sans notes).

Nice! I was curious and took a look at this, but don't have a commercial disassembler right now so mostly just kind of realized it was pretty complicated, what with the format apparently allowing for additional glyphs not in the IBM437 codepage (!?!). This is why Project Gutenberg is so adamant about text files...

One minor thing: you might want to dump the text for Patricia again, turning on the (n)otes first, as they are part of the source text. I managed to dump the whole thing by using dosbox+xnee to automate dumping one screen at a time, and that did capture the notes once I turned them on. (I'd just post my version, but dumping one screen a time resulted in ambiguous breaks between the screen boundaries.)

-Marshall

[Patricia]

I'm ok about the notes: there aren't very many and it's easy to move them. And I am so pleased. I had worked out that I could copy a bit at a time but Igor has saved me hours and hours of work.