Limitations and known issues
This page contains the known but unfixable problems that may occur using RetroTxt.
Unsupported text formats
Micro-computer era, non-standard ASCII are not supported.
Binary formats such as .xb and .bin are not usable as browsers refuse to display unidentified binary data in a tab.
As the browser DOM and HTML are designed for static text, creating text motion and animations would require considerable programming and hacking for little reward.
BBS era ANSI art
Many Bulletin Board System era ANSI art relied on an 80x25 fixed terminal with the cursor positioning to create motion and animations that do not convert using RetroTxt, including ANSI animations and music.
Text files that always download
The opinionated browser feature MIME sniffing often overrides RetroTxt, forcing text files to download rather than display in a tab. Nothing can be done to stop this.
Chrome and Edge browsers can produce incorrect MIME sniffing results with the file:/// protocol.
Missing or invalid characters
Text encoded in CP-437 will fail to print several characters in the browser, as it does not support most MS-DOS-era text encodings. Instead, the browser often interprets these texts in a legacy Windows encoding.
One of the issues with 8-bit character encodings is that many code pages are missing some of the 256 codepoints. So, while the IBM CP-437 used in many ANSI art pieces retains a complete set of codepoints, the Windows legacy CP-1252 utilized in browsers only presents 251 codepoints, meaning these five character glyphs are lost when swapping between the two.
ü ì Å É ¥
For example, fünf, German for five, is a valid word in CP-437 but breaks as a Windows CP-1252 document.
