bushnel@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (60163000) (08/05/88)
Last week I posted a request on the net asking for advice on converting generic Macintosh text files to Unix-compatible text files; in particular, I wanted to convert the soft return at the end of each line to a hard return for UNIX compatibility. Overall, I received about 15 responses to my request for help, and I thank each one of you who responded. For those of you who may have had the same problem as I had, I will summarize the advice I received: The most common suggestion was that I use MacWrite, save my work as text then choose the option of inserting a return at each line-break. I have to admit I was a bit embarrassed not to have tried this, but I had never had the need to save a MacWrite document as text, so I had quite forgotten that the option was available. I presently use WriteNow (v. 1.07) which uses a somewhat inconvenient translator program to convert WriteNow documents to text. The translator does not have the option of converting the soft returns to hard returns. Several people suggested that I use the UNIX command "fmt" to convert to hard returns. This seems to work O.K., but I was hoping I could find a way of doing this on the Mac. Also "fmt" isn't a very flexible program, and I don't really want to learn the intricacies of "nroff" at this time. The suggestion I most appreciated was to buy the shareware program McSink. One of the people who responded even mailed me a copy. McSink is exactly what I was looking for. This posting was written with McSink. The desk accessory is rather large (~70k or so), but it is packed with so many features that I don't think I'll ever use all of them. This is one program that should be submitted to comp.binaries.mac. I received version 4.5, but I understand that there is a version 5.0, and possibly a later one, so the latest version should be posted, if at all. As you can probably see, with version 4.5 there are some bugs with the way text is justified flush right. I hope these bugs were ironed out of the latest version. Several people had other programs, but I don't remember the names of the programs off-hand. Once again, I would like to thank all of you who responded to my question. bushnel@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Bill Bushnell)