Charles Poynton -
Line end rant

Line ends. The designers of UNIX chose to denote the end of a line of text with a "newline" character, LF. Unwisely, Microsoft chose to end a line in a different way - not one character, but a sequence of two, CR/LF. Also unwisely, Apple chose to use a single character different still - CR. All that is water under the bridge - any of us who deal with cross-platform text files must wrestle with this issue. (Choosing text mode when you transfer a file handles exactly that issue, and no others - text transfer does not deal with any character set issues.)

But the basic Macintosh text editor, TeachText - now called SimpleText - refuses to deal sensibly with anything but the Mac convention. It garbles files that contain foreign line ends. Why? Wouldn't it be a piece of cake to accommodate LF and CR/LF?

Charles - Mac Rants
Copyright © 1997-02-21
Modified 1997-09-02