The issue of converting 8 bit hexidecimal may seem to be one that would not come up very often. However 8 bit hex is a common format for bitmapped images (grayscale PostScript) and if you wish to take a scanned image and turn it into floats for further processing, then it will come up.3.1
If you have a scanned image, written as a 256 level grayscale bitmapped PostScript image, then the bitmap portion is in 8 bit hex. By removing all of the PostScript commands, and leaving only the bitmap then the command
% h2b < hexdata > floatdatawill convert the bitmap into a form that can be viewed and processed by programs in the CWP/SU package.