brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (01/27/89)
As a gift to the net, I have written a new improved binary encoder which is going to be released soon. It uses non-whitespace, printable characters only, but that's not enough. I am told that sometimes travelling through IBM machines (bitnet etc.) maps tilde ~ to ^. Are there any other perils like this I should be wary of, before release? Is the tilde problem real or isolated? Thanks. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
lbilccss@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Lawrence Bilker) (01/28/89)
You can use graphics.com supplied with DOS to do standard print-screen dumps on an epson or compatible printer.
eps@noe.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) (01/30/89)
In article <2686@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >I am told that sometimes travelling through IBM machines (bitnet etc.) >maps tilde ~ to ^. Are there any other perils like this I should be >wary of, before release? Is the tilde problem real or isolated? I ran into this about 2 months ago. The tilde problem is real and becoming increasingly widespread (gateways that didn't have the problem two weeks ago do now). Others: ^ (caret) can become a square bracket or a blank space. | (vertical bar) can become a colon. DEL becomes lowercase "k" (I know better, but thought I'd try it anyway). Several people mentioned that EBCDIC has two different vertical bar characters (4F=solid; 6A=broken). KLEINSIN@INFOODS.MIT.EDU suggested I look into ISO8859@JHUVM.BITNET (via LISTSERV) for discussions on code conversion problems. -=EPS=-
bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker) (01/31/89)
In article <2686@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >As a gift to the net, I have written a new improved binary encoder which >is going to be released soon. > >It uses non-whitespace, printable characters only, but that's not enough. >I am told that sometimes travelling through IBM machines (bitnet etc.) >maps tilde ~ to ^. Are there any other perils like this I should be >wary of, before release? Is the tilde problem real or isolated? > >Thanks. >-- >Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473 Try using the 64-byte charset ".,[0-9][a-z][A-Z]". Some countries use different representations for the values, but the translations are consistent. IBM mainframes mistranslate at least "!^[]{}~`\|" and different parts of their systems mistranslate them differently... The 64-byte charset doesn't have this problem - probably one could get a valid 85-byte charset (I understand "btoa" etc. needs this), but that's probably pushing it. Also I've noticed that some versions of "uuencode" put a "table" entry in the output which gives the table values used for mapping. This works as long as each character translation value is unique going from machine to the next - sadly, in the IBM world at least, this is not always true... Cheers, -- _ _/\ Bruce Becker Toronto, Ont. \`o O| Internet: bdb@becker.UUCP, bruce@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu \(")/ BitNet: BECKER@HUMBER.BITNET ---mm-U-mm--- "Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue" - Oliver North