Dave PearsonExperimenting some more with an #MCP server to better understand this stuff: https://blog.davep.org/2026/04/12/ngmcp-v0-2-0.html
#MSDOS #clipper #nortonguide #AI #python #programming #fastMCP
Dave PearsonI'm building an online #NortonGuide collection, in the hope of preserving all those handy help files we used to work with back in the #MSDOS days. Can you help?
blog.davep.org/2025/12/12/n...
#help #hypertext #clipper #caclipper #xbase
A Norton Guide collection
A Norton Guide collection
A Norton Guide collection
As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, I've long had a bit of a thing for writing tools for reading the content of Norton Guide files. I first used Norton Guides back in the early 1990s thanks to the release of Clipper 5, and later on in that decade I wrote my first couple of tools to turn guides into HTML (and also write a Windows-based reader, then rewrote it, wrote one for OS/2, wrote one for GNU/Linux, and so on). One tool (ng2html) got used by a few sites on the 'net to publish all sorts of guides, but it's not something I ever got into doing myself. Amusingly, from time to time, because I had a credit on those sites as the author of the conversion tool, I'd get random emails from people hoping I could help them with the topic of whatever guide they'd been reading. Sometimes I could help, often not. From what I've recently been told two of the biggest sites for this sort of thing (they might even have been the same site, or one a copy of the other, I didn't really dive into them too much and wasn't sure who was behind them anyway) have long since gone offline. This means that, as far as I can tell, a huge collection of knowledge from the DOS days is a lot harder to get to, if it hasn't disappeared altogether. This makes me kind of sad. So I had an idea: having recently polished up my replacement for ng2html, why not use that to build my own site that publishes the guides I have? So I set about it. There's one wrinkle to this though. While the other sites seemed to just publish every NG file they got their hands on, I'd prefer to try and do it like this: publish every guide I have in my collection that I have a licence or permission to publish; or as near as possible1 Given all of this, norton-guides.davep.dev has been born. The repository that drives it is on GitHub, and I have a wiki page that lists all the guides I have that I could possibly publish, showing what I know about the copyright/licence of each one and what the publishing state is. So with this, I'm putting out a call for help: if you remember the days of Norton Guide help files, if you have Norton Guide help files I don't have, and especially if you are the copyright-holder of any of these files and you can extend me the permission to open them up, or if you know the right people and can get me in touch with them, DROP ME A LINE! I'd also love to have others join me in this... quest. So if you want to contribute to the repository and help build it up I'd also love to hear from you. I will possibly be a little permissive when it comes to things that I believe contain public domain information to start with. ↩
I'm building an online #NortonGuide collection, in the hope of preserving all those handy help files we used to work with back in the #MSDOS days. Can you help?
https://blog.davep.org/2025/12/12/norton-guide-collection.html
A Norton Guide collection
As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, I've long had a bit of a thing for writing tools for reading the content of Norton Guide files. I first used Norton Guides back in the early 1990s thanks to the release of Clipper 5, and later on in that decade I wrote my first couple of tools to turn guides into HTML (and also write a Windows-based reader, then rewrote it, wrote one for OS/2, wrote one for GNU/Linux, and so on). One tool (ng2html) got used by a few sites on the 'net to publish all sorts of guides, but it's not something I ever got into doing myself. Amusingly, from time to time, because I had a credit on those sites as the author of the conversion tool, I'd get random emails from people hoping I could help them with the topic of whatever guide they'd been reading. Sometimes I could help, often not. From what I've recently been told two of the biggest sites for this sort of thing (they might even have been the same site, or one a copy of the other, I didn't really dive into them too much and wasn't sure who was behind them anyway) have long since gone offline. This means that, as far as I can tell, a huge collection of knowledge from the DOS days is a lot harder to get to, if it hasn't disappeared altogether. This makes me kind of sad. So I had an idea: having recently polished up my replacement for ng2html, why not use that to build my own site that publishes the guides I have? So I set about it. There's one wrinkle to this though. While the other sites seemed to just publish every NG file they got their hands on, I'd prefer to try and do it like this: publish every guide I have in my collection that I have a licence or permission to publish; or as near as possible1 Given all of this, norton-guides.davep.dev has been born. The repository that drives it is on GitHub, and I have a wiki page that lists all the guides I have that I could possibly publish, showing what I know about the copyright/licence of each one and what the publishing state is. So with this, I'm putting out a call for help: if you remember the days of Norton Guide help files, if you have Norton Guide help files I don't have, and especially if you are the copyright-holder of any of these files and you can extend me the permission to open them up, or if you know the right people and can get me in touch with them, DROP ME A LINE! I'd also love to have others join me in this... quest. So if you want to contribute to the repository and help build it up I'd also love to hear from you. I will possibly be a little permissive when it comes to things that I believe contain public domain information to start with. ↩
I've just released v1.0.0 of ng2web, a command line tool that converts a #NortonGuide file into a collection of static web pages. Useful if you want to revive information locked up in Norton Guide files.
ng2web v1.0.0
It pretty much all started with this: * Revision 1.1 1996/02/15 18:57:13 davep * Initial revision That's from the rcs log for the source for w3ng, a tool I write so I could read Norton Guide files in my web browser, served by Apache running on my GNU/Linux server in my office. The tool itself was written as a CGI tool (remember then?). I believe I posted about this to comp.lang.clipper and pretty quickly some folk asked if it might be possible to do a version of that would write the whole guide as a collection of HTML files for static hosting, rather than serving them from cgi-bin utility. That seemed like a sensible idea and so: * Revision 1.1 1996/03/16 09:49:00 davep * Initial revision ng2html was born. Fast forward around a quarter of a decade and I decided it would be fun to write a library for Python that reads Norton Guide files, and a tool called ng2web was the first test I wrote of it, designed as a more flexible replacement for ng2html. I've tweaked and tinkered with the tool since I first created it but never actually "finished" it. That's changed today. I've just released v1.0.0 of ng2web. If turning one or more Norton Guides into static websites seems like the sort of thing you want to be doing, take a look at the documentation. ng2web is licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPi. If you have an environment that has pipx installed you should be able to get up and going with: $ pipx install ng2web It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing ng2web: $ brew tap davep/homebrew $ brew install ng2web
Now that work on my new #NortonGuide reader has settled down, and given that the underlying library has had some improvements, I think it's time to tidy up `ng2web`; another tool that uses that library.
I've released v0.3.0 of AgiNG, my #NortonGuide reader for the #terminal. The main addition in this release is searching.
See https://blog.davep.org/2025/03/22/aging-0-3-0.html for more details.
AgiNG v0.3.0
I've just released AgiNG v0.3.0. The main focus of this release was to get some searching added to the application. Similar to what I added to WEG back in the day, I wanted three types of searching: Current entry search. Current guide-wide search. All registered guides-wide search. The current entry search is done with a simple modal input, and for now the searching is always case-insensitive (I was going to add a switch for this but it sort of felt unnecessary and I liked how clean the input is). The search is started by pressing /, and if a hit is found n will take you through all subsequent matches. As always, if you're not sure of the keys, you'll find them in the help screen or via the command palette: Guide-wide and all-guide searching is done in the same dialog. To search guide-wide you enter what you want to find and untick "All Guides". With that, the search will stick to the current guide. As will be obvious, searching all guides that have been registered with AgiNG is as simple as ticking "All Guides". Then when you search it'll take a walk through every entry of every guide you've added to the guide directory in the application. Global searching is accessed with Ctrl+/ or via the command palette. With this added, I think that's most of the major functionality I wanted for AgiNG. I imagine there's a few more tweaks I'll think of (for example: I think adding regex search to the global search screen could be handy), but I don't think there's any more big features it needs. AgiNG can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing aging: $ brew tap davep/homebrew $ brew install aging The source is available on GitHub.
Looking through some of the new #NortonGuide files I found, this might be my new favourite entry in any guide ever.
In an effort to really shake down my #NortonGuide reader project, I've been looking around the net for any Norton Guide files I don't have in my collection.
Found another 11, including a rather nice #MSDOS programmers guide I'd long forgotten about.
I'm at the "add global search" stage of working on my new #NortonGuide reader; and it's thrown up some issues with corrupted or badly-written guides. So NGDB v0.10.0 is out and it's much more defensive. https://github.com/davep/ngdb.py/releases/tag/v0.10.0
I also wrote a tool to scan every guide I have to hand to look for any issues: https://github.com/davep/ngdb.py/blob/main/.comprehensive_test/read_all_known_guides
