On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 04:21:00PM +0000, Jack Campin wrote: > > 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?
Zip, in particular the freeware info-zip, has handled this stunningly for me in the past. When you unzip, there is a switch to convert any-file-it-recognises-as-text into the local OS's line endings. So far it seems to recognise abc files as text and behave appropriately. When zipping a file for an unsuspecting novice on another platform, you can convert during the zipping instead. If your current zip program doesn't do this (check its docs): Microsoft users, search for 'info-zip' on a shareware site. Macintosh users might search for 'info-zip' or 'wiz'. For those of us on unix systems, mtools can convert text files while they are being copied to/from a floppy disk, if asked to. The following article might also be of interest. It is for BSD users wanting to create floppies for other platforms, but it explains the problem and includes both mtools and zip examples: http://www.daemonnews.org/199902/newbies.html BTW, one way I'm using floppies is to send abc files and programs to a Windows 3.11 user who teaches music in the country (i.e. he's not rich), and has no Internet connection. If anyone has recent experience with abc programs to use and print from abc on that platform, I'd appreciate an email chat, since most software sites are highly ambiguous about their 16 bit (or Win32s) support. -- Regards, -*Sue*- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
