The company I work for has a program that is no longer supported called QADisplay. Inside of this program is a tool for annotating images. It's very similar to photoshop in that it takes a layer based approach to the annotations with each annotation as its own class in Delphi 7. These annotations are stored as the base image and a text file with the information describing the contents of the annotaion.
The issue is that the text that is displayed in the annotations is somehow encoded in the text file. For example, if the annotation displays as "Arial" (without the quotes), the text file will be written as: TEXT (Type of annotation) 5 (Length of the literal string, in this case: Arial) 07)I86P (The encoded string)
What I need to do is extract all of the text from the annotations in preparation for the installation of our new software system.
I am not familiar with Delphi and do not have access to the source code. I have tried to disassemble the executable but haven't had much luck there. Does anyone have any ideas on how to approach decoding this? I've googled around a bit (Arial "07)I86P") and found some results relating to virus scan error logs and things of that nature but no dice on anything that I found helpful in relation to the issue I'm having.
That is not a standard text encoding. Maybe it is encrypted?
Without documentation or contact with the original developers, you will have to reverse engineer the app. Using a disassembler/debugger like IDA, if you can pause the app after it loads 07)I86P into memory, you can follow the code as it processes the characters, which will help you reconstruct the decode algorithm.