[Ham-Mac] TQSL - sensitive to line endings

[Bill Coleman]

I've been in the process of uploading all of my logs to the Logbook of 
the World. I'd finished just about everything, except for one set of 
field day logs from 1996. These were recorded with an ancient DOS 
program called Logmaster, which required you put each band/mode on a 
different diskette.

Recovering the log data from this ancient program took some doing -- 
particularly when the 300 Q 15m Phone log couldn't be read. I 
eventually deciphered the file format and wrote a program to extract 
the data. After a couple of hours of massaging with Excel, Textedit and 
the XCode text editor -- I had a passible Cabrillo log of the event.

However, when I tried to sign this log of 900-odd QSOs, it was only 
writing 6 records to the .tq8 file. Two records are for signing, and 
the remaining 4 were QSOs.

I finally uploaded the short .tq8 file and found that the 4 QSOs were 
scattered throughout the log. After a little more playing, I found the 
culprit.

I had created this file using several tools on a Windows machine and 
finished the job up on my Powerbook. In the process, the line endings 
got changed to Unix-style line endings -- except for about 4 lines. 
Apparently, TQSL is sensitive to this. I changed the line endings to 
Windows-style and re-saved the file. Bingo, TQSL found all the QSOs.

MacOS X is weird about this. Officially, Apple recommends you write 
Unix-style line endings and accept any style when reading text files. 
Not all programs behave properly.

Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr at arrl.net
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
             -- Wilbur Wright, 1901