Re: [dq-rules] Edi's Work and File Formats (Was: Re: Edi's Work and Armor )

[Esko Halttunen <esko.halttunen@luukku.com>]

Jeff Johnson wrote:
> > So, everyone, feedback would be appreciated, and we could do with 
> > some lively discussion, don't you think?
> 
> Can't comment on content yet. However, can on format:
> 
> I suspect the reason you're having trouble getting your text files 
> to look right is because you're using tabs, not spaces, to delimit 
> the columns. Every editor has a different default setting for how 
> large it displays a tab character. And that's even before the 
> different default fonts used.

Usually that is determined by how many characters per tab space there is. I first had a problem with Crimson Edit using 4 and Wordpad using 5, so I switched CrimsonEdit to use the same. Still doesn't work. Crimson Edit uses the same font as Notepad, so I don't see how that's a problem. Documents written in Notepad are fully legible in CE and vice versa, but Wordpad seems to throw a wrench in the works. Of course, it might be CE messing around, but I happen to like that text editor and it was easier to fix things by hand, mostly it was just lines having either one extra or one less tab in Wordpad.

I hate using single spaces in text documents, because it makes doing a document of this magnitude *very* tedious.

> 
> So long as you use a fixed-width font, though, a text document with 
> spaces instead of tabs will display the same in every editor. (The 
> only problem you can run into is the different linebreak characters 
> used on differnet platforms, but there's utilities to handle that).

I'm not much of an expert on text files, but seemed to me that the problem was largely with Wordpad's linebreaks and inability to count 

> 
> Similarly, if you're going to provide Word and OpenOffice format 
> docs, you should use the program's native tables rather than tabs.

Actually, what I did with that was write the damn thing up in OO and then save another copy in MS Word format after the whole thing was done, and then edit the few places that are screwed up back to what they should be. OO can read native Word documents, but the proprietary Microsift file format adds some stuff which makes a lot of things appear really fucked up and these need to be fixed by hand. If you save from OO format to Word, these instances are much rarer, and typically the only problem is that if something was in bold font originally but changed back to normal, that line (or a part of it) will be bolded in the Word version.

I might do the things in table form in a later version, but I just wanted to get the thing ready and didn't really think about it at all. One reason is also that I only have experience of native tables in Word, and they are for the most part more trouble than they are worth and then some, so I've developed an aversion to them.

But thank you for the comments, I'll keep them in mind for future reference.

Edi

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