Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 23:31:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@gns.com.br> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: handbook.ascii Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970624230449.24754A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <199706241509.MAA00861@gns.com.br>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 24 Jun 1997, Daniel C. Sobral wrote: > Annelise is suggesting that the main target of handbook.ascii are > Win95 users (with Laserjet/Deskjet printers, obviously). In which I > agree. Yes, exactly. > > Thus, this file should be targetted at what they have: edit, DOS' > more, notepad, Word 7.0 and similar programs. That's the whole point > of using a stripped down format: so everyone can read. Read (on the screen) and print. (The FAQ and the handbook should be relatively tolerant of bad hardware, buggy software, and user ignorance and error, I think.) > > There aren't any ^H characters in the file, as far as I can tell. > > A hex dump shows all the duplicate letters. > > Have you downloaded these files using ftp in ascii mode, by any > chance? Because the handbook.ascii I have here has all BS characters. Yes, ascii, but with lynx or Netscape (ftp ascii seems to preserve the BS characters). It did not occur to me that a file that claimed to be plain text and had a .ascii extension needed to be downloaded in binary mode or at least by ftp. With or without the BS characters, it makes for difficult reading. Some of the characters (the soft hyphen and the bullet character marking paragraphs are two I'm aware of) will show up incorrectly since this is in the latin1 character set, and dos/Windows uses by default code page (character set) 437 (850 in Europe and Canada), which isn't the same as iso-latin-8859-1. (So will FreeBSD, unless it's explicitly changed.) The printing will also be incorrect in places unless the printer has an 8859-1 character set and is told to use it, or substitutions are made first. Quite a gaunlet to run for a potential new user. Annelise
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSI.3.94.970624230449.24754A-100000>