mbeck@brl.mil (SECAD-guest) (08/30/89)
Hello - I've just gotten around to start upgrading from 1.3d to 1.4a. The new 1.4a helpfile, as received by this site, seems to have been mangled in a weird manner. Tabs have been replaced by spaces, multiple newlines replaced by single newlines, underscores with backspaces.. all in all, a rather distorted mess. This as opposed to the 1.3d helpfile which came over nicely formatted. I have checked the archives; the original post on file there has the same kind of problems. Could someone e-mail me a clean copy of the 1.4a helpfile? Please e-mail first [save net bandwidth]. Thanks for your time. Mark mbeck@BRL.MIL
root@cca.ucsf.edu (Systems Staff) (08/30/89)
In article <22776@louie.udel.EDU>, mbeck@brl.mil (SECAD-guest) writes: > > I've just gotten around to start upgrading from 1.3d to 1.4a. > > The new 1.4a helpfile, as received by this site, seems to have been > mangled in a weird manner. > > Tabs have been replaced by spaces, multiple newlines replaced by single > newlines, underscores with backspaces.. all in all, a rather distorted > mess. Your posting prompted me to look at the copies of these files we have. They are as you described except that the underlines are preserved (and are, quite properly for a preformatted file, followed by backspaces). There are no backspaces in the file other than those which follow underlines. The white space manipulation you describe sounds like a common form for print file transmission which strips all trailing blanks except for one left on the last line of each page and removes trailing empty lines on each page. If such a file is transmitted over a link which, in turn, also strips trailing blanks these would be lost and the result would be as you see. IBM systems are known to commit both these distortions. Of course, tabs to spaces conversions are often done in sending to printers when it isn't known how to set tab stops (e.g. you don't know what printer it's going to. It certainly doesn't reduce legibility; it just makes the file bigger. Not so weird, after all. Fortunately, the numbered page heading lines are easily identified by a couple of regular expressions (e.g. /^[2-9]$/ and /^ *[1-9][0-9]$/) so form feed codes can be inserted easily (e.g. with sed) to get a reasonably printable form. Thos Sumner Internet: thos@cca.ucsf.edu (The I.G.) UUCP: ...ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf!thos BITNET: thos@ucsfcca U.S. Mail: Thos Sumner, Computer Center, Rm U-76, UCSF San Francisco, CA 94143-0704 USA I hear nothing in life is certain but death and taxes -- and they're working on death. #include <disclaimer.std>