fac2@dayton.saic.com (Earle Ake) (02/22/90)
In article <635556696.22387@myrias.com>, mj@myrias.com (Michal Jaegermann) writes: > This is plea for a good advice in the following problem. > > From time to time one has to mail some TeX files over Bitnet. For a > benefit of those of you who never did it - Bitnet machines often have > a nasty habit of using different translation tables for supposedly the > same EBCDIC character set. For example, when receiving text files on > one of Bitnet accounts to which I have an access you are nearly > assured that left square bracket, right square bracket, tilda and > carret characters will be mapped into something in non-printable range. > What's more - both tilda and carret will be mapped onto THE SAME code. > Other characters likely to be garbled include underscore, all kinds of > accents and the like. Similar problems occur also on a mail out. On VMS, a command procedure has been written to handle such troubles you get into when sending over bitnet. The procedure is VMS_SHARE. It changes such characters as <tab> into things that bitnet will accept. It also breaks the pieces up into nice neat packages suitable for mailing. I am sure some of you unix guru's out there have something like this or could easily write something to handle it. I could send some of the output from it and explain what the different character strings translate to. Anyone interested? -- _____________________________________________________________________________ ____ ____ ___ Earle Ake /___ /___/ / / Science Applications International Corporation ____// / / /__ Dayton, Ohio ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet: fac2%dayton.saic.com@uunet.uu.net uucp: uunet!dayvb!fac2
jdc@naucse.UUCP (John Campbell) (02/23/90)
From article <985.25e29ee6@dayton.saic.com>, by fac2@dayton.saic.com (Earle Ake): > On VMS, a command procedure has been written to handle such troubles > you get into when sending over bitnet. The procedure is VMS_SHARE. It > changes such characters as <tab> into things that bitnet will accept. ... > I am sure > some of you unix guru's out there have something like this or could easily > write something to handle it. Nah, I already asked locally and no one cared. Seems the accepted practice is to just use uuencode (which will do the job for unix machine by the way). Most of the shar programs only have to worry about internet or uucp mail and no one cares that unix bitnet mail is mostly trash by the time it crosses over to another machine. (Try sending diffs over bitnet where each tab character is counted as 8 bytes and then we wrap at 80...) Seems a shame to me. I seldom expect a VMS program to be superior to a unix program, but VMS_SHARE, in my opinion, seems better than any of the 4 or 5 unix shar programs I've looked at. -- John Campbell ...!arizona!naucse!jdc CAMPBELL@NAUVAX.bitnet unix? Sure send me a dozen, all different colors.