[comp.os.vms] VT100 screens to Ventura?

david@varian.UUCP (David Brown) (02/06/88)

We're trying to document a VMS-based product, and would like to
be able to easily include screen images.  We use Ventura Publisher
on AT clones for documentation.   The VMS product uses VT100-type
terminals, using things like line draw characters, block graphics
characters, 132 column mode, reverse video, and double-height/double-width
characters.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we could could get those screen images
to Ventura?

My first idea was to run a VT100 terminal emulator on a PC, and use
some sort of TSR utility to capture the screen.  The latest version
of kermit (2.30) claims to do 132 columns on certain adaptor cards, one of
which is the Vega Video 7 - I tried it but couldn't get it work.  Also,
double height/width characters don't show up on the screen as such.

I guess what I really need is a terminal emulator that puts the PC
(probably with a VGA or super EGA adaptor) into graphics mode in order
to implement the double height/width characters.  Does anyone know of
such a beast?

Another approach I considered was doing something on the VMS end - is
there anything that can get you from a screen image to, say, HPGL?

How about a filter that converts ANSI sequences to Ventura tags
(e.g. change the font size for double height/width chars)?  That
sounds like it might be a lot of work to get it just-right.

Currently, screen dumps are being put on hard copy on some slow dot
matrix graphics printer (an LA50, I think, but I haven't been involved).
I suppose we could use a scanner to read in the hard copy output, but
it seems the most cumbersome method and would give the poorest results.
I don't know how things get sent to the printer; if it's a bit map,
perhaps this could be captured and converted to a bit map that Ventura
understands.  Again, a lot of work I suppose.

I'm hoping that someone out there has had a similar need and come up
with a solution.

Thanks in advance

-- 
David Brown	 (415) 945-2199
Varian Instruments 2700 Mitchell Dr.  Walnut Creek, Ca. 94598
{ptsfa,lll-crg,zehntel,ista,rtech,csi,kinetics}!varian!david