Christian Cepel wrote: >I'm a bit confused, reading through the documentation available online. > >Our first task in development is of course to parse an abc file. I'm >trying to figure out, per the 1.6 standard, WHAT EXACTLY the _approved_ >linefeed/newline character, and encoding are for abc. >
This is a continuing problem for all of us. Most users are unaware of the differences in newline character encoding and find it very confusing (It's all text isn't it?). In writing BarFly I decided that it was going to be impossibly complicated to preserve and handle original encodings within the program, so I test new files as they open and convert them to the Mac standard (CR). The program also saves them in this format so that they can be expected to work with other Mac text editors. This seems to be the technique which causes least complaint from users, i.e. accept any format but export the data in the format which is local to the platform. There is a way in which the program can be made to export text in any of the formats, but I don't advertise it as it's simply going to confuse the less sophisticated users. If all abc programs adopted the same strategy the problem would simply disappear (but how likely is that?). Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
