topic Re: GENERAL REQUEST in Operating System - OpenVMS

GENERAL REQUEST

Willem Grooters — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:31:43 GMT

Just a request!

In general, if you CUT&PASE ito the forum, you'd better do this from plain ASCII. It will keep the entry clean and readble...

On occasion, I happen to read the forum from one of my VMS boxes, and I'm surely not the only one. Not all have a graphics interface, I _may_ have to rely on a text-only browser like LYNX. It's bad enough you need a web-browser to get to the data where DECNotes would often do...

Therefore this request:

Do NOT assume that everyone uses a system capable of presenting Office documents (in whatever format), or even graphics. Sometimes, the latter cannot be avoided, but the majority is text.

That implies:

* If you attach a file containing text, please use plain ascii. No HTML if that's not part of the example.
* If you attach an image, please convert it into a generic format like PDF or JPG.
* Large listings are better send as an attachment, eventually zipped (but that is a personal preference) - nevertheless: the files themselves should be in a generic format.

I found it time to mention this.

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Karl Rohwedder — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:09:30 GMT

I can only agree with Willem and please don't attach DCL procedures as .COM...

regards Kalle

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Robert Gezelter — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:17:42 GMT

Willem,

Certainly, for normal matters, ASCII text should be fine.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Jan van den Ende — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:37:27 GMT

Willem,

another big AYE !!

I counld not agree more.

And though VMS nor LYNX would care, some other browsers DO demand that plain-text files be named .TXT

Please comply with that as well.

Another frequent "issue" stems from non-transportable diacritics & special symbols.

Please refrain from those as well.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Joseph Huber_1 — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:30:53 GMT

>> please don't attach DCL procedures as .COM...

The only point I don't agree: there is only one browser in the world, which has problems with .COM filenames, because it ignores the text/plain mime header: MSIE.
This browser should be avoided by all means! (not just for VMS forums).

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Jan van den Ende — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:56:46 GMT

Joseph,

I am quite sure that I am not alone in that at work, I am (by company policy) restricted to just THAT one.

Not my choice, but one has to make concessions to the "main sponsor"...

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Edwin Gersbach_2 — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:51:29 GMT

I'm limited to the most stupid browser as well - at least here in the office. But what bothers me often is that the text is not displayed as intended by the writer. The following excerpt is from a new tread from yesterday:
---
If it is a TEST $ IF Ã¢Â Â Ã¢Â Â Ã¢Â Â p1Ã¢Â Â Ã¢Â Â .eqs. Ã¢Â Â TESTÃ¢Â Â then $ execute=Ã¢Â Â DIR Ã¢Â Â or a execute = Ã¢Â Â TYPE Ã¢Â Â and you check the existence of all the imbedded command files to execute
---
I hope it comes through as I see it: instead of quotes and double-quotes, I see a diacritical character followed by two squares. I guess this comes from pasting text out of a word document where word did some 'beautifying' to the quotes.

Very ugly indeed.

Edwin

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Jon Pinkley — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:56:23 GMT

The combination of MS Word and the ITRC makes for some interesting displays. It doesn't help that when you paste it, things look ok. If you don't preview, you won't see the problem.

Having had post lost due to the ITRC forums going offline, I generally edit offline and paste into the ITRC. And I try to run this through a spelling checker before pasting.

Here's what seems to work for people using Windows.

Download a program like Metapad that will convert the slanted quotes to standard quotes. Metapad is a free notepad replacement that has other uses as well, for example it can convert text to and from cr-lf terminated lines (DOS) to lf only (Unix) format.

If you have used Word to compose or spell check, select all the text (Cntrl-A) copy to clipboard (Cntrl-C), open Metapad and paste the text there. The text will be "coerced" into ASCII, so things like quotes will be displayed correctly. Once in metapad, select it all again, copy to clipboard and paste into the ITRC.

If I remember to do these steps, the posts look as good as is possible with the fonts that the ITRC uses.

Here's a example entered in Word, and pasted directly here, followed by the same line first pasted to metapad, then recopied and pasted to the ITRC.

Copied directly from Word

$ write sys$output â This is from â â mswordâ â

The same line after pasting into metapad and recopying to clipboard before pasting into ITRC follows:

$ write sys$output "This is from ''msword'"

I don't understand why the ITRC software can't do this conversion itself. There seems to be no advantage to the way it gets displayed, because you can't cut and paste it back into Word to restore it to its original form.

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Anton van Ruitenbeek — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:22:17 GMT

Jon,

..
I don't understand why the ITRC software can't do this conversion itself. There seems to be no advantage to the way it gets displayed, because you can't cut and paste it back into Word to restore it to its original form.
..

The same question we also ask is why do we have a downtime during upgrades ? If they were running OpenVMS for ITRC whe had a real stable environment. Know (unfortunaly) its running on HP-UX with all discomfort and interference with work.

AvR

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

John Abbott_2 — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:27:29 GMT

Jon, thanks for the metapad heads up. I'll try this at home. Unfortunately like others I only have MSIE and limited access. If anything is attached as a .COM I can't even down load to view it (it gets blocked).

Cheers
John.

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Willem Grooters — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 06:24:08 GMT

You can send .COM files, but then you will have to do some tweaking. Nothing complicated, since this is plain ASCII, there is a very simple solution: rename the file before upload to .com.txt.

The advantage of extensions like .TXT and .JPG (and other displayeable formates) is that most browsers - not just MSIE - will be able to handle it directly, which is just very, very handy. Even with commandprocedures ;)

(Has anyone thout about spreadsheats? Export thema s .CSV in Excel and the recipient will be able to handle that without a problem. Again, it's plain ASCII.)

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Jon Pinkley — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 06:27:37 GMT

RE: Metapad

If you Google metapad, the following will show at the top. And that's the software I am referring to.

http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/ home page

I used to replace notepad with metapad, but on my most recent laptop, I just have a shortcut on the quicklaunch section of the taskbar, and a shortcut in sendto and associate common text file types with notepad.. I chose the non-LE version, but the choice is yours. Windows 2000 and more so XP make it a pain to replace notepad; but it can be done.

Jon

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Hein van den Heuvel — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:29:06 GMT

>> If you have used Word to compose or spell check,

Ha die Willem,

This was the topic I found in the ITRC mentioning spell checking. Yes, I also have used external tools to compose, select, copy & paste. (I typically used Gmail compose for that, it will do plain text).

I just wanted to point out that now with GOOGLE CHROME as browser you get a (English) spell checker with any text box, including replies here.

Hein.

Re: GENERAL REQUEST

Steven Schweda — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:44:00 GMT

> [...] now with GOOGLE CHROME as browser [...]

I seem to get (imperfect) red underlining of
(claimed) spelling errors here using SWB
1.1.10 ("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; OpenVMS
COMPAQ_Professional_Workstation; en-US;
rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080928
SeaMonkey/1.1.10").