Subject: Re: problem importing text

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 19:26:56 -0500

On 2 Dec 1996, Christian Doellner wrote:

> Every time I cut and paste my word processed documents the line wrapping
> is always screwed up and the apostphroes and quoatation marks change
> into U's.  I've tried converting my posts to ASII and it makes no
> difference.

    Unfortunately, as a rule of thumb it often causes problems to use a
word processor to compose email or news.  A text editor is much safer. 
Like it or not, the Internet is still largely based on ASCII with a
hard end-of-line indication, and most word processors use other
internal mechanisms.  Some WP's allow exporting of a document in ASCII,
but even then there can be gotchas.  I suggest a text editor over a
word processor.

    As for apostrophes and quotation marks, make sure you are entering
the ASCII characters, not some nice looking symbol which is not ASCII.

> Yet when I cut and paste most internet documents into Pine there are
> no format problems.

    Such documents may already be in correct ASCII format.

> Can anyone help me?  And why is it that my ARROWS in my word
> processor work, but don't work in Pine? I'm using a MAC 190cs lap-top.

    Are you using your laptop to dial into a host computer?  If so,
then it could be that the signals generated by your arrow keys (so to
speak) are not getting translated correctly into the control sequences
expected on the host system for cursor movement.  For example, when I
dial into my provider, DOS communications software on my DOS PC
emulates a VT100 terminal.  When I press an arrow key, the comm s/w
translates that into the equivalent control sequence standardized for a
VT100, and the cursor moves.  If you are dialing in somewhere, you
might check your terminal emulation.  This is only one possibility, of
course.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

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From: [email-masked] (Christian Doellner)
Date: 2 Dec 1996 11:05:48 GMT

-- 

Christian Doellner  [email-masked]
---------------------------------------                                         

"This is all going to end badly. I'm going to
 end up old, broke, and a flasher."
          ----- Walker Percy to Shelby Foote
                November 28, 1977
--------------------------------------------

---

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 1996 14:50:42 +0100 (MET)

>but even then there can be gotchas.  I suggest a text editor over a

There is another "dirty" solution, though. You can save it as "DOS with codes"
in Word (if you use it, which you shouldn't, of course). This way, you can
keep your Umlaute, however, you'll lose the "apostrophes" which probably
aren't apostrophes, anyway, but rather special characters.

Cheers,
Robin

   ++--+---+---+---+---++---+---+---+---+---++---+---+---+---+---++
	Robin S. Socha			Bonner Talweg 56	 	
   	53113 Bonn			Germany		        
	Tel (0228) 22 21 78		Fax (0228) 22 21 79
	email: [email-masked]	
   ++--+---+---+---+---++---+---+---+---+---++---+---+---+---+---++	
     On the package it said: "Requires MS Windows 3.11 or better"  
	       			      ...  so I got myself Linux. 
   ++--+---+---+---+---++---+---+---+---+---++---+---+---+---+---++

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From: Peter Karlsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 14:00:05 +0100

On 2 Dec 1996, Christian Doellner wrote:

> is always screwed up

That would not be so strange, since word processing documents usually
don't have line wrapping like text files, but instead are free-flowing
(the line-wrapping symbols only appear at paragraph endings).
Unfortunately, the Internet mail and news format usually does not allow
for free-flowing text (if you ask me, it's a "bug" in the format), you
would need to manually re-format the texts before pasting them into Pine.

> and the apostphroes and quoatation marks change
> into U's.  

Are you using the ASCII quotation marks ("), or "typographical" quotation
marks (code 147 and 148 in ISO 8859-1).

\\//
Peter - [email-masked] - http://www.mds.mdh.se/~dat95pkn