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Postings from July 2014
On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 7:25 AM, David Cantrell <david@cantrell.org.uk> wrote: > On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 02:28:48PM -0600, Karl Williamson wrote: > >> I also think that Vertical Tab and Form Feed are so infrequent that they >> should be counted as non-text (currently VT is non-text, but FF is) > > Consistency is good, and while FF is rare, it's nothing like *as* rare > as VT. I know that I have some documents that contain it, because I > remember deliberately putting them there, but I've only ever seen VT in > deliberately pathological test cases. > > So I vote for FF being treated as text. > Its similarity to LF and CR makes me believe FF could be dealt with the same as LF and CR. It's use back in the days of DOS was as a simple way to start a new page. You could run something like `copy example.txt LPT1` and the printer would skip to the next page upon receiving a FF. FF would basically do a CR followed by enough LFs to get to the next page. On Epson dot-matrix printers you would have to set up vertical tab positions with ESC codes before you used VT. ( similar to how you would set tab stops on a typewriter. ) Which makes me believe it was used for filling out preprinted forms. Very useful for making duplicates with carbonless copy paper. Since TAB has come to mean 8 spaces I think it could be considered as text. I don't think that VT should though; as it is very specific to the hardware you are communicating with. >> ESC currently is >> considered text, and my patch retains that, as it is relatively commonly >> used in rich text files. > > RTF isn't really plain ASCII text so I think that's a bad argument. ESC > isn't printable so I'd love to see it considered to be un-text. However, > I think that I'd again go with consistency and so hold my nose and treat > it as text - unless it becomes un-text everywhere else. > The last time I used ESC was when I was directly controlling my dot-matrix printer. Where it is used as an indicator that the bytes that follow are used to change a mode. Such as setting it into graphics mode. I think it should be considered in the same way as DC1 .. DC4, and BEL. ( Some of my first Perl programs were created to play around with my dot-matrix printer ) > -- > David Cantrell | Pope | First Church of the Symmetrical Internet > > fdisk format reinstall, doo-dah, doo-dah; > fdisk format reinstall, it's the Windows wayThread Previous | Thread Next