Editing ansi escaped text

[Daniel Mahu]

Hello,

I'm trying to edit a piece of text that contains ansi escape sequences
for terminal colors (if that's the right name for them). The text is
used for the help screen in the boot loader on a linux bootable CD.

If I dump the text to a terminal, it is displayed in colour; however,
when I open it in emacs, the special characters come up as escapes
(i.e. "\033") and are very disturbing while editing.

I have found on emacswiki something that does half of exactly what I'd
like: ansi-color.el, that can translate these escapes to emacs
character properties.

What I'd like to ask is whether you know of any package that does the
translation both ways, thus allowing me to seamlessly edit the text
and save it without losing the original formatting.

If there's no such thing, then please tell me if I can at least get
rid of the escapes, by hiding them somehow so that I can arrange the
text easier.

Thanks,
--daniel