About MKASCII.EXE

To create a formal translation of the SAP POS system, an ASCII version of the binary file literal.lit that contains all the system texts must be produced and sent to the translation production group. The mkascii.exe utility is used to extract text from the literals file and convert it into ASCII format. It places the extracted contents into a file called litdef.txt.

You can run this utility from a command line in \Program Files\SAP\Retail Systems\Utilities and use the following parameter settings to customize the output. In the event of an error, the application indicates the parameters that are required.

Parameters required for mkascii.exe

The mkascii.exe utility requires the following parameters:

/O	Overwrites literalText file if it exists	Optional
/V	Displays literals that have been retrieved from the lit file to the console	Optional
literalFile	The literal file to be converted to text file format	Mandatory
IDfile	litdef.h Header file used to read text from the binary file installed at the following location: \Program Files\SAP\Retail Systems\Utilities	Mandatory
MasterTextFile	litdef.txt Text file that is merged with data retrieved from the lit file	Mandatory
literaltextfile	Text file created by the process	Mandatory

Note Note

The mandatory fields may include the path before the file name. There is no default location for the files other then folder in which the utility is executed.

End of the note.

Output of the mkascii.exe utility

The mkascii.exe utility produces a text file as output. The text file name and path are specified by the literaltextfile parameter. The format is similar to a standard text file with the following modifications:

Separator text is added to the end of each line after the ## characters as it appears in the Master text file. This allows comparison of the master text to the text in the literal file.
For specific index numbers, <N> followed by the old constant name and test description, in case the textual constant changed the name at the end of the line after the ## special character. 'N' stand for the line where the identifier is moved to. If N is 0, it means that the identifier no longer exists. Original text and identifiers follow. This allows investigation of any possible issues.
If at the end of the line after the ## sign, @@ line appears, it means that this line does not exist in the original file. If the same identifier is located in other location of the lit file, the system adds text from this identifier after the @@ sign.