H&L Associates is an electronics engineering consulting firm which has been in operation since 1980. They have developed retrofit products for the complete line of David Mann pattern generators.

While our ASM2600 takes care of fracturing GDSII (or DXF) data to David Mann 3000/3600 pattern generator format, these files are then loaded to the H&L software which acts as the interface to the pattern generator.

Our customers noticed that our Mann output is not compatible with the H & L software and after some help from Scoot Harris from H&L we found out that the problem was related to a header block that ASM2600 puts at the front of the output files.
There is nothing incorrect about this header info but it causes a problem with the H & L interface.

Solution

H & L Associates has a utility called acsfix.exe which cleans up ACS files and removed the header information.

You can run it in a Windows command shell or drag and drop your files onto it and it will generate an output file with the same name except with an additional .TXT extension added.
A log file of problems if any is also generated. For example: running the program on TEST.DWM generates TEST.DWM.TXT and TEST.DWM.LOG. The output is plain text, viewable with any text editor and H & L UPG3600 software will read it as plain ASCII input and convert it to their TAP format.