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Re: Is 8BIT ESTMP really needed

2001-05-13 09:12:25
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In <01K3E3D0XPV6002XZW(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com> 
ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com writes:

What about them? AFAIK there has never been an application type defined which
specified that some sort of line ending canonicalization is to be performed.

Or not performed.

Surely there are plenty of application types which simply say "this data
consists of lines of text in the following format" with the expectation
that machines will be able to act on it, and that they will know what the
end of a line looks like when they see one (there is a general expectation
in the Unix world that lines of text will be terminated by NL, and in the
DOS world that they will be terminated by CRLF).

Indeed, we defined three such application types in the USEFOR draft with
the expectation that the "system" would ensure they went out on the wire
with CRLF on them as part of its normal operation (the usual encoding
being 8bit). Should we have said more?


PDF is pure binary material. There are no line endings in it that 
can be safely
canonicalized. The same is true of Postscript -- if you try and canonicalize
the line endings in Postscript often as not you'll break it.

As a matter of interest, I checked what Ghostscript did, and it accepted
naked CR, naked LF or naked CRLF as the end of a line (which is consistent
with the spec. in the Red Book).


Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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