Re: Unknown File Type with .fm from New Zealand

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "Stuart Burnfield" <stuartb@tpg.com.au>
> There's another thing that can go wrong when sending files. I doubt
> it applies in your case but I'll mention it just for completeness.
> If you're moving text files between Windows and UNIX, you need to
> know that there's a slight difference in the 'end of line' character
> used on each platform. When a UNIX text file is opened under DOS/
> Windows, Windows 'sees' an extra non-text character at the end of
> each line. The rest of the file is perfectly OK but this difference
> is enough for Windows to think the file is not ASCII and must be in
> an unknown format.

It's the other way around: Windows insists on an extra character.
In ASCII text files, "end of line" is coded like this:
* UNIX: Line Feed (LF) only
* Windows: Carriage Return (CR) plus LF
* Mac: Carriage Return (CR) only
This means that when you open a text file on another platform,
you may experience problems like extra characters, no line breaks,
etc. It depends on how "smart" your applications are.

> The fix is to use a pair of UNIX commands called unix2dos and
> dos2unix. As the names imply, these convert text files from UNIX to
> DOS format and vice versa.

The problem with these commands is that they only work OK for 7-bit
US ASCII. If you have text files with 8-bit ISO-8859 encoding
(national characters), the commands convert them to the *DOS*
equivalents, which is different from the Windows encoding.
(Windows uses ISO encoding, DOS does not...)

This last comment is just for completeness; it doesn't apply to 
FrameMaker files (MIF text files).

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Thomas Michanek, [Michagon], Linkoping, Sweden
Documentation Consultant, FrameMaker/UNIX expert
EMAIL:  mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telia.com
WWW:    http://go.to/framers , or go directly to:
        http://w1.133.telia.com/~u13304072/framers
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