> 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?).

I suspect that the worst troublemaker here is archiving and compression
software.  FTP programs, web browsers, many text editors and some ABC
applications know how to deal with the variations if they get a chance
to identify what they're importing as being foreign, but if you bundle up
a mass of text files on one platform and ship them to another one, the
chances are you're going to get everything-on-one-line, double-spaced
text, or garbage characters at the other end.  The archivers I know of
don't have the concept of a platform-independent representation for line
endings in text files.

What do people here recommend for a cross-platform archiving format
where implementations on each of the major platforms do the sensible
thing with text?

=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================


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