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Well yeah I think it probably was but that doesn't account for computers older than that or the ones which no longer have it installed for whatever reason (second hand machine, lost discs, etc).
sigh This is frustrating me* and I've a right mind to give up on such people now. We could always do a poll on the Nova boards. If it turns out they're like less than 1% we can say something like "On behalf of the entire EVDC, screw you!".
* Who were the frickin' idiots that thought it would be funny to make 2 different characters to do the same thing? And then design 3 different formats based around them??!
That poll sounds like a good idea- just make sure you mention that it is for readme formatting purposes. You might also want to ask if the pre-OS X users have any method of reading RTF files.
And, just because I thought I could, here's a simple AppleScript that can convert the line breaks in a plain text file into Windows format. It works on OSX and any previous versions that can run OSX scripts (and has a compatible "Standard Additions" AppleScript plug, although I don't think I'm using anything too unusual).
Edwards
Zacha Pedro said:
It seemed to me that AppleWorks was bundled on all OS9 computers, but I may be wrong.
I don't believe it was ever standard on high-end computers - it was only bundled with Performas, iMacs, and the like.
Guy, on Oct 28 2005, 09:38 PM, said:
Who were the frickin' idiots that thought it would be funny to make 2 different characters to do the same thing? And then design 3 different formats based around them??
It goes back to the days when computers were controlling actual, physical teletypewriting machines; LF (ASCII 10) made the typewriter move to the next line, and CR (ASCII 13) moved the head back to the left side of the page.
Once this sort of technology disappeared, a number of people noticed that, since computers were smart enough to combine the two operations, the only difference having two characters made was that every line break took up two bytes rather than one (a big deal in those days ). The problem was, which one should go? Apple kept CR, UNIX kept LF, and Microsoft didn't bother dropping either of them, so that's where the problem comes from.
Edwards, on Oct 29 2005, 07:56 PM, said:
That poll sounds like a good idea- just make sure you mention that it is for readme formatting purposes. You might also want to ask if the pre-OS X users have any method of reading RTF files.View Post
Yeah, that was the idea. Does anyone know if ClarisWorks was ever bundled?
Edwards View Post
See further up for LineBreak (freeware).
David Arthur, on Oct 30 2005, 07:28 AM, said:
Once this sort of technology disappeared, a number of people noticed that, since computers were smart enough to combine the two operations, the only difference having two characters made was that every line break took up two bytes rather than one (a big deal in those days ). The problem was, which one should go? Apple kept CR, UNIX kept LF, and Microsoft didn't bother dropping either of them, so that's where the problem comes from. View Post
Ah, I see. But couldn't they have noticed that earlier?
Guy, on Oct 29 2005, 03:31 PM, said:
See further up for LineBreak (freeware).View Post
Oops, missed that. It doesn't work on OS9, though.
And I'm pretty sure that ClarisWorks came bundled on our Performa whichever-it-was (with OS 7.6).
Guy, on Oct 29 2005, 06:31 PM, said:
Ah, I see. But couldn't they have noticed that earlier? View Post
The thing is that computers adopted a system already in use by teletypewriters, and they did need two characters - sending just a CR would have printed each line over top of the line before, and sending just an LF would make them try to write off the end of the page, as the carriage would never return.
ClarisWorks was bundled with Performas, but never standard on all Macintoshes.
Hey, just found this free conversion utility: RTF-to-Styled Text Unfortunately it doesn't translate the line breaks. But the REALbasic source code is also available - anyone wanna have a crack at fixing it?
David Arthur, on Oct 29 2005, 07:28 PM, said:
In fact it did not always have to involve computers (this is the sixties... the Jurassic of computers, the dinosaurs having not yet disappeared ) - remember ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the telewriters did directly communicate with these codes. And if you have a closer look at the first 32 chars, the control chars, you can see quaint old stuff such as ACKnowledge, Negative AcKnowledge, etc... In fact, you could very well underline whole words by having them typed, then order some backspaces to go back a little, then some underscores; the same way, you could concievably do the accented chars by adding the accent afterwards the same way (check: the tilde, grave and circumflex accents are there; it was thought the single quote could be used as the acute accent as well).
(By the way, it is quite indicative of a strong MS mindset, that they usually don't like dropping old, obsolete, outdated stuff...)
If AppleWorks (or ClarisWorks before it) has been consistently bundled with not high-end Macs in the last OS9 years, and since we can reasonably expect high-end Macs to have been equipped with either AppleWorks or MS Word (or both) by their owners... I don't think that leaves out a significant portion of people; on top of that, we don't have to worry about too old computers since Nova usually doesn't run too well on PowerPC procs before the G3 (I didn't actually try on stuff such as the Power Mac 9600/350, the fastest pre-G3 Mac, but I remember trying it on not much slower stuff and it didn't run at an acceptable speed). So let's run that poll and check the results.
Guy, on Oct 31 2005, 03:02 AM, said:
I tried multiple methods, and all of them produced excess LFs (like 4 of them) at the top of the text file. I couldn't figure out why.
DA or SP might be up to it though.
If I ever download a plugin whose readme is not in RTF format, I will purposely not read the readme.
orcaloverbri9, on Nov 5 2005, 07:36 PM, said:
DA or SP might be up to it though. View Post
Just a few at the top? Shouldn't matter. Actually it seems to be only TextEdit RTFs that it has problems with. Check that your fixed one still works with all these ones. If it does, send it to The Apple CΕre and then I think we can wrap this up.
Well this is interesting. Works perfectly now. Yay!
Actually I think I know what did it. Regardless, Apple Core, I can email it to you.
Nice work Maybe we can get pipeline to add it to the essentials section in case there's anyone else.