[GreenKeys] Heavymetal, tty bulletins, etc.

[Robert McConnell]

MAC OS-X is supposed to be Unix in drag, so hopefully it conforms to the LF 
convention. However, older MAC systems actually used LF/CR as their end of 
line delimiter.

I too would suggest a user selectable option for translation of EOL 
markers. Or provide one of the simple 'tr' style filters to do bulk 
conversions before feeding the file to Heavymetal. There used to be a free 
DOS application called TRANS that would do that. I typed the command "trans 
/r/n /n < in.txt > out.txt" many times to convert DOS text files for my 
Linux system. I never learned the syntax for tr.

Bob McConnell
N2SPP

At 12/23/02 02:16 PM -0600, Douglas W. Jones wrote:

>On Monday, December 23, 2002, at 11:44 AM, Bill Buzbee wrote:
>
>>I'm in the process of digging through my Heavymetal teletype control program
>>to fix the ASCII cr/lf problem that Jack ran into.
>
>This may not be trivial unless you simply give the user the option
>of asking for conversion of LF to CR/LF.
>
>Part of the problem is that Windows and Unix have different
>conventions for line ends embedded in text files.  Windows
>text lines end with CR/LF pairs, while Unix text lines end
>with just LF.  I think MacOS just uses CR for line end, making
>life even more confusing.
>
>If you convert all LFs to CR/LF, you'll convert Windows style
>CR/LF pairs to CR/CR/LF (nice for those with sticky Teletype
>carriages that take too long to return).
>
>If you convert all CRs that aren't immediately followed by LF
>to CR/LF, you'll fix problems with text files that originated
>on someone's Mac, but you'll wreck overprinting that's essential
>for some ASCII art.  (but if people use BS for overstrikes,
>there's no problem.)
>
>Most ASCII art that uses CR for overstrikes originated on
>punched cards, where character 1 of each card indicated whether
>this card was the start of a new line or something to overstrike
>over the line currently under development.
>
>                                         Doug Jones
>                                         jones@cs.uiowa.edu