[Weter]

Gerry, I have used ConText for many years and find out, how to do that.
Furthermore, if You press Ctrl+M after placing the cursor next to the brace, You interested, ConText will jump to corresponding brace for You.
Otherwise, it'll highlight the brace as red symbol in yellow rectangle, but you'll have to scroll and search it by yourself.
I use Syntax verifying function of act.manager utility too: it scans defined directories for errors and gives you the list of files with number of erroneous strings, where unpaired brace been found.
Dave, thank you, I'll maybe see that program.

By the way: what CR/LF means?
Open office Writer betrayed me, hiding a string with pasted parameters of *.eng-file, due to "different" return symbol.

[Sid P.]

I have been using "TextPad" for many years as my text editor. It has options to show text-sensitive coloring of specific terms in the file by the use of Syntax Definition files that are selected based on the type extension of the file opened. I have an old syntax file from MSTS that was contributed by "Andrew Miller" that includes many of the terms found in locomotive files, for instance. It allows for personal text options on your selection of files based on their extensions. It also has automatic bracket matching like other tools. A single copy of TextPad costs a one-time payment of 16.50 GBP (Pounds). A free evaluation is offered.

[Genma Saotome]

Weter, on 16 February 2021 - 07:08 AM, said:

By the way: what CR/LF means?

It is an ancient abbreviation for what was done with typewriters everywhere: Carriage Return (pop the roller wheel left so the next character is the first in line) followed by Line Feed (roll the paper up so the next line is ready to receive letters).

When computers were a fairly new thing the same concept applied to printers because mechanically they were about the same as typewriters. In modern terms the phrase (and code) is called newline and it accomplishes the same thing in your text editor. If you have a text editor that provides a replace function using an escape character* you can manipulate codes that you can't see but do affect how things look, stuff like tabs.


* escape characters is a trick that allows your editor to manipulate characters you normally never see, things like tab, newline, and indent. Most editors follow the unix convention of using the backslash character "\" to indicate whatever character follows is handled in a special way -- it escapes from normal processing. For example, if I wanted to find all occurrences of two tab characters I'd search for \t\t and if I wanted to find the end of a line followed by a tab character I'd search for \n\t

There is another trick called Natural Expressions, which I'll not get into except to say with them the escape character is used to indicate whatever character that follows should be understood as what it is and not part of the natural expression command -- just the opposite of how you use them outside of natural expressions.

[Weter]

Dave, you pleased me!
Oh, I didn't know that, but always wonder, which things force editors to begin a new line. There is symbols look like capital Pi, showing that in winWord or WordPad, and also OpenOffice writer or ConText, etc. At the same time, there is symbols like broken arrow (as printed on Return button).
Now, I guess, that when I've chosen the wrong option during file opening at Writer, it interpreted entry line as Code, but not as text of *.eng-file's parameter, so it became invisible then.
As when I trying to open @Simisa files at Writer, the dialogue asks me to specify
1) encoding <I choose Unicode, or ANSI for *.dat-files> and
2) end of line processing, which can be CR, LF, or CR&LF.
So have I choose the third variant?
And another question: is that @Simisa - header format the MSTS-exclusive(ORTS-inherited) or it's more common?

[Genma Saotome]

Simisa is something from unicode... a file header of some sort. Other than that, I don't know anything else.

[engmod]

From James Ross's site.

Silver's Simple Site - Weblog - Simis Jinx Unicode Text File Format
Simis Jinx Unicode Text File Format

This is one of the 2nd-level (inner) formats for the Simis file format used by Microsoft Train Simulator.

As I mentioned last time, the 1st-level (outermost) format has an adjusted header when working with this 2nd-level format; in particular, the file starts with a UTF16-LE byte order mark and the header itself is Unicode text encoded as UTF-16LE. Here it is again:

00000000 FF FE 53 00 49 00 4D 00 49 00 53 00 41 00 40 00 ÿþS.I.M.I.S.A.@.
00000010 40 00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40 00 40 00 @.@.@.@.@.@.@.@.
00000020 40 00 @.

The 2nd-level format identifies itself with its own header, unsurprisingly, starting with the text "JINX0", two values indicating the 3rd-level (inner inner) format, the text "t" indicating the Unicode text variety of this format, some padding (6 underscores) and a newline.

00000020 4A 00 49 00 4E 00 58 00 30 00 .. .. .. .. J.I.N.X.0.....
00000030 74 00 5F 00 5F 00 5F 00 5F 00 5F 00 5F 00 0D 00 t._._._._._._...
00000040 0A 00 ..

Those 4 missing bytes are the two characters (a letter then a number) that identify the 3rd-level format used. As text, the header of these files looks like the following line:

SIMISA@@@@@@@@@@JINX0..t______

Now follows the actual data...

Simis Jinx files all store data in a tree-like structure, where each tree node has a type and optional name, and is intermixed with values. In other words, each node's children can be both nodes and values, including a mixture. The structure is marked out by parentheses ("(" and ")") for blocks, with values being raw or quoted strings (generally speaking, any value with no whitespace and no significant symbols - quotes, parentheses - can be left unquoted). Let's get straight to an example from Microsoft Train Simulator, the file GLOBAL\gui.txt:

SIMISA@@@@@@@@@@JINX0I0t______

io_dev ( KEYB 0
io_map ( T "sounddialog" ALL_UP SHIFT_DOWN )
io_map ( ESCAPE "escape" ALL_UP )
io_map ( F1 "Help" ALL_UP )
)

The header has identified this as containing 3rd-level format "I0"; for now, though, let's focus on the 2nd-level format. There is a single root node of type "io_dev" (and it has no name) which contains:

The value "KEYB".
The value "0".
Three nodes of type "io_map", each containing a selection of values but no further nodes.

This is just a simple example, but the format is pretty easy to read (although a little tricky to parse correctly); the 3rd-level format actually defines which node types and what nesting of them is allowed and which values should be where.

Permalink | Author: Silver | Tags: Format, Games, Microsoft, Simis, Train Simulator | Posted: 04:48PM on Thursday, 22 April, 2010 | Comments: 0

[Genma Saotome]

Derek, is there anything in that data that would be of any use to any of us? Looks like KUJU shortcut codes to me.

[engmod]

I don't thing so, Dave.

[pwillard]

This whole SIMIS header thing seems so arbitrary now.

[Weter]

It's Useful for understanding the law.
Thanks,Derek.