03-05-2020, 09:15 AM
New forum looks nice! Um, anybody here though?
I was doing some nostalgia clicking, and I noticed QBOHO was in pretty bad shape:
http://www.qbasicnews.com/qboho/
I scraped that together years ago with a python script that parsed the rtf output of HELPMAKE.EXE and dumped it into a bunch of HTML files, which wildcard translated and uploaded. It used the IE-only "terminal" font, tables,   padding, and other horrors to replicate that loving "DOS" look, and it's all horribly broken now of course.
Nowadays browser support for Unicode, custom fonts, CSS, etc. is much better. Even the QuickHelp tooling is better. I found this C# tool which already converts quickhelp files to UTF-8 encoded HTML:
https://github.com/fancidev/DosHelp
So I wrote another Python script to reprocess that a bit further. I used one of the fonts from here:
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
And then packed everything into one CSS-only HTML page that uses anchor links to jump between topics, and the :target selector to show one topic at a time. Having only one page should make it a little easier to embed somewhere else. Sure, it's a 1.2MB but since it's all whitespace and English, that gzips down to 240kb. And the average webpage is 3MB so who cares?
Anyway, the result:
https://parkertomatoes.github.io/qboho/
https://github.com/parkertomatoes/parker...ster/qboho
Possible to get it updated here?
I was doing some nostalgia clicking, and I noticed QBOHO was in pretty bad shape:
http://www.qbasicnews.com/qboho/
I scraped that together years ago with a python script that parsed the rtf output of HELPMAKE.EXE and dumped it into a bunch of HTML files, which wildcard translated and uploaded. It used the IE-only "terminal" font, tables,   padding, and other horrors to replicate that loving "DOS" look, and it's all horribly broken now of course.
Nowadays browser support for Unicode, custom fonts, CSS, etc. is much better. Even the QuickHelp tooling is better. I found this C# tool which already converts quickhelp files to UTF-8 encoded HTML:
https://github.com/fancidev/DosHelp
So I wrote another Python script to reprocess that a bit further. I used one of the fonts from here:
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
And then packed everything into one CSS-only HTML page that uses anchor links to jump between topics, and the :target selector to show one topic at a time. Having only one page should make it a little easier to embed somewhere else. Sure, it's a 1.2MB but since it's all whitespace and English, that gzips down to 240kb. And the average webpage is 3MB so who cares?
Anyway, the result:
https://parkertomatoes.github.io/qboho/
https://github.com/parkertomatoes/parker...ster/qboho
Possible to get it updated here?