Subject: From: Date:

Re: [ECS] txt extension Ingo Pakleppa Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:24:09 -0400

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.TXT does denote a plain ASCII text file.

The problem lies in the fact that ASCII only defines the lower 128
characters. The line-drawing characters were inventions of IBM that
never made it to the rest of the computing world. In fact, back in the
ages when not all MS-DOS computers were IBM compatible (yes, I still
remember that time!) not even all DOS machines would support them.

Windows for most intents and purposes uses the ISO character set, which
is identical to the ASCII character set and also defines the upper 128
characters - but quite differently from the way IBM uses it.

There is a way to read files with line-drawing characters under Windows
properly, but it would require the user to change the character set in
Notepad or whatever he uses to view the file. The font to use is called
"Terminal". Maybe the easiest thing to do is to write a little viewer
application similar to Notepad (in fact, I believe the source code for
Notepad is in the SDK); the only differences being that it would only
allow reading a file, and that it would use the Terminal font. Such a
program would probably be no more than a few hundred lines at most.
Notepad is not much more than a wrapper around an edit control (you may
want to use an RTF control instead if the files are larger than 64k).

Then make up your own extension - for instance ".DOS" might be a good
one, and associate that extension with your viewer. Name your readme
files readme.dos instead of readme.doc.

Ingo

Mark Gilmore wrote:

> Is there no extension (.DOC, .TXT, etc) that denotes a
> PLAIN ASCII TEXT file ???
> --
> Mark Gilmore
> Omnipotence
> http://members.a2zsol.com/omnipotence.html

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