My Norton Guide Readers
Introduction
Going back to the 1990s, I've built and maintained various tools for ensuring we still have access to information held in Norton Guide database files. Quite a few of the tools listed here are pretty old, but I'm keeping them online just in case anyone ever needs access.
I do have more recent tools available too; I'll list them here and link to my GitHub repositories.
w3ng - Norton Guide reader for web servers (deprecated)
Warning
I would strongly advise against using this these days. It's left here in case it's ever any use to anyone.
w3ng is a cgi-bin utility that will allow you to make your Norton Guide files available off a web server. Obviously, you need to be running some web server software for this to work.
I first wrote w3ng to allow me to read my Norton Guide files under GNU/Linux, and also from machines that connect to my Linux box. The code should work with just about any system, it might need one or two small changes so it can work on your setup, but I've test compiled it fine on Linux, OS/2 and Dos and it seems okay.
The source for w3ng is available in two formats, you can either download it as a ZIP file or a GNU gzipped tar file.
ng2html - Norton Guide to HTML converter
After writing w3ng I
had a couple of people mail me and ask if it was possible to write a utility
that would convert Norton Guide files into HTML files. This was pretty easy.
ng2html is basicly a hacked version of w3ng that, instead of feeding the
output to stdout, writes a set of files to disk.
The source for ng2html is available in two formats, you can either download it as a ZIP file or a GNU gzipped TAR file.
Expert Guide - terminal-based Norton Guide reader
Expert Guide started life as an OS/2 text mode Norton Guide reader (the OS/2 version is still available but no longer supported). I then rewrote it for GNU/Linux, and since then it's been reworked so that it can run on GNU/Linux and macOS.
It's also installable via Homebrew.
weg - Expert Guide for Windows
WEG is a version of Expert Guide for Microsoft Windows. WEG is written in Delphi 5 and should run on all current versions of Microsoft Windows.
jsNG - Small JavaScript library for reading Norton Guide database files
jsNG is an effort to produce a more "modern" take on ng2html and w3ng, by developing a node.js/JavaScript/ES6 library and set of tools.
The package includes library code for opening and reading Norton Guide files; a tool to convert them into HTML pages; and a tool to serve them directly via a mini self-contained web server.
eg.el - Expert Guide for GNU Emacs
eg.el provides code for reading the content of help databases built with Norton Guide and Expert Help. It also provides commands for viewing and navigating the content of Norton Guide files.
ngdb.py - A Norton Guide database library for Python
At the time of creation, I'd been working with Python as my daily-driver
language for quite some time, but hadn't actually written a Norton Guide
library for it; ngdb.py aims to put
that right. Still a bit of a work in progress, it does provide all the
basics for reading from a Norton Guide file, and it is intended to form the
core of some other tools I want to build.
ng2web - A command line tool for converting Norton Guides to HTML
Very similar in spirit to ng2html mentioned above,
ng2web is a command line tool that takes
a Norton Guide file and turns it into a collection of HTML files. Built on
top of ngdb.py, it too is a work in
progress that I want to flesh out to be as comprehensive as possible.