Codepage module description

DOSPRN supports various codepages. At present, 852 (East Europe), 850 (West Europe), 737 (Greece), 437 (USA), 857 (Turkish), 862 (Hebrew), 775 (Latvian), 1125 (Ukrainian), 855 (Cyrillic), 866 (Russian), 874 (Thai), 932 (Japan), 949 (Korean), 936 (Simplified Chinese) and 950 (Traditional Chinese) codepages are supported.

Moreover, users can create another codepage support module. Each language module is a text file with .CP or .CPX extension.

Now DOSPRN supports two formats of codepage modules: "old" .CP format for single-byte codepages only and "new" .CPX format for multi-byte and single-byte codepages

List of codepage modules

437=USA (DOS OEM)
737=Greek (DOS OEM)
771=Lithuanian (DOS OEM)
775=Baltic (DOS OEM)

CP codepage module specification

This file includes the strings of the below type:

ascii_letter=unicode

In this example, "ascii_letter" is a standard DOS symbol. Since the first half of ASCII table (codes from 0 through 127) contains the non-printable symbols, Roman letters, signs and numbers, we recommend that you specify only the second half of ASCII table (codes from 128 through 255).

This part of the table usually contains letters of a national alphabet. Their tracing is determined by the type of codepage that you use in DOS. You should find the appropriate letter in the Unicode table and write its code after equals sign. You can write a Unicode number both in decimal and hexadecimal format. In the second case, the number must be preceded with the "$" sign.

For example, you can describe the "?" symbol as ?=$3F or ?=63.

In case ASCII letters and Unicode letters follow one by one, you can use more compact form

ascii_letter1..ascii_letter2=unicode1..unicode2

where "letter1..letter2" are a range of DOS letters and "unicode1..unicode2" are a range of corresponding Unicode symbols.

CPX codepage module specification

This file includes the strings with tab seprated columns of the below type:

ascii_hex_code<tab>unicode_hex_code

In this example, "ascii_hex_code" is a code of DOS symbol in hex 0xXX (for single-byte symbols) or 0xXXXX (for double-byte symbols). Also lines can contain comments preceded with the '#' sign.

This part of the table usually contains letters of a national alphabet. Their tracing is determined by the type of codepage that you use in DOS.

For example, you can describe the "£" symbol in CP437 as 0x9C<tab>0x00A3.

You can copy any language module file to a new file (but with the same extension) and open it in text editor (Notepad or similar, don't use Windows Word instead). Then you can modify the Unicode strings and save this file.

After you've done the codepage file updating, you should add new code page description in the "codepages.lst" file and restart DOSPRN. Your codepage module will be loaded.