The Grimoire: A Conjuring Guide

For quite a while, I have been managing the FreeDOS Translation Project (aka. FD-NLS) over on GitHub. That is where the translations for the packages provided for FreeDOS™ are managed. When the individual projects receive new translations or updates to existing ones, we will try to include them in the packages that are in the FreeDOS releases and in the Online Download and Update Repositories. Often, we will notify the active developers of the related projects that translations are available. However, many of those developers will simply check for new translations on their own.

The translation contributors over at FD-NLS are a great bunch of people. They put a lot of time and effort into their work in order to provide the community with spectacular translations. But for a number of reasons, they sometimes only submit translations as Unicode (UTF-8 encoded) text files. Nearly all, DOS programs use Codepage encoded ASCII text files. For many languages, this is no problem. I can simply open it in my preferred text editor, select the appropriate DOS codepage and save it. Unfortunately for some languages, it is truly a nightmare converting them to codepage. Sometimes, it is because the text editor does not provide the number for the codepage and only a "helpful" description like "Western (ISO Latin 9)". Even worse, there are times where the modern desktop editors just do not support the required codepage.

After many years of suffering through such conversion headaches, I finally just had to do something about the problem. And as such, the Codepage Witch was born. She is not a DOS program. She is a modern desktop application for macOS, Linux and Windows that is intended to solve those problems and much more.

While the Codepage Witch (aka. CPWitch, Witch or CPW for short) has the primary function of converting text files to and from Unicode and Codepage, she performs a lot of magic behind the scenes in order to try and make the process of transcoding easier. From deciphering the text and determine its language and locale, to recommending the proper codepage to use in conversion. Plus, a lot of other features.

Although the Codepage Witch is not very difficult to use, she is a little different and can be a little confusing at first. She also has a few personality quirks which can mystify those who have known her a long time. This is her Grimoire which aims to help her friends understand her better.