Some discoveries in working on uploads...
Aside from > and < used for redirecting to/from a filename or KEYBOARD/CONSOLE, the < and > characters shown below are not typed.
To configure the serial port, starting at the main Workshop menu:
rportconfig<return>
then type return to go through the settings.
To switch the console to RS-232 port B, starting at the main Workshop menu, ending in the System-Mgr menu:
scrby
To switch the console back to main when finished using the serial port, starting at the main Workshop menu, ending in the System-Mgr menu:
scmy
To start uploading a file, to be named "filename", starting at the main Workshop menu:
Note: ".text" is appended to the filename unless it already includes it
with echo to the screen
rcopy<return>
>filename<return>
without echo to the screen
rcopy<return>
<-KEYBOARD,>filename<return>
To end uploading (sometimes one less <ctrl-m> is needed, perhaps patience makes a difference?)
<ctrl-n><ctrl-m><ctrl-m>
To run the charcount function on a file named filename, starting at the main Workshop menu:
rcharcount<return>
<filename,>-CONSOLE<return>
To interrupt an operation (equivalent of Apple-. or ctrl-c)
<ctrl-[>
Text File CompressionThe Workshop manual mentions something about compressing the leading spaces on each line in a text file, using a DLE character and a space count character. Presumably this is to not punish indentation styles. I believe line lengths are limited to 255 characters so a single count character is always sufficient.
In terms of the size of a file as reported by charcount vs the size of a file prior to upload, it seems that you can get the numbers to match when:
- the line ending is considered a single character
- the compression reduces the size by the number of leading spaces greater than 2 on each line
- the compressed size is 2 greater than that derived from the two preceding rules
I haven't investigated how the data is actually stored on the disk (eg. is a line with 2 spaces DLE 0x02 or ' '? etc., and why/where are 2 characters added... a 16 bit file length perhaps?)DLE (aka "Data Link Escape") is 0x10 in the ASCII table.
A line starting with 6 spaces is encoded as 0x10 0x26
I'm closing in on an AppleScript solution using Roger Meier's CoolTerm
https://www.freeware.the-meiers.orgCoolTerm claims to be python scriptable too and is available for Windows and Linux. The pacing option that waits for a character's echo seems particularly well suited to this task. YMMV
edit: for clarity... english is hard
edit2: added charcount and copy without echo
edit3: added thoughts about the leading spaces compression in text files