Re: Mail to text conversion help needed

[ntt@cleese.apana.org.au (Jonathan Pratt)]

slyder@cats.ucsc.edu (Elwood B Bredell III) writes:
> 
> To anybody who can help,

=^)

> I have a problem that I was wondering if someboby could
> help me with.  Often on Usenet there are messages that I
> want to save to disk and read later or print.  I use the NN
> news reader and type shift "S" to save the message I've
> selected.  I have no problem saving the file or getting it
> downloaded to my apple IIgs.  The problem is that when I
> open the file with any of my word processor programs the
> returns seemed stripped and the formatting is messed up.  I
> imagine this is because the mail message format isn't set
> up to look right as a straight text file.  I suspect
> instead of returns the mail format uses another command to
> make output look right to the screen.  If the only way to
> solve this program is to output the file to the screen
> using NN or a file reader like MORE and then save the
> output using an ascii text capture don't tell me how to do
> it.  That's what I do know if I REALLY need the file. It's
> a pain. E-mail or a post to this Newsgroup would be really
> helpful.  Thanks

Unix systems terminate their lines with a line feed (control-J) whereas a
carriage return is used on apple systems (control-M) {messy dos systems
have both...}  Your GS doesn't know what to do with the linefeed, so
probably displays a funny character, depending on the font you're using)

The solution - change all the LF's to CR's (ACSII 10 to ASCII 13) on your GS

There are some utilities to do this.  utoa (Unix TO Apple) is a utility to
convert your text from one system to another from on the Unix side of
things.  After you've saved your file as 'name' you would type "utoa
'name'" and the final result would be a properly formatted text file when
you got back to your GS.  Perhaps this file is available on your unix
system (perhaps not)

LF2CR.NDA is available from cco.caltech.edu (an ftp site) and will do the
same thing from the luxury of your GS.  Obviously its an NDA, but it will
scan through selected files and strip out the LF's replacing them with
CR's (as one would expect from the name).  You can do the same thing with
a block editor, or by simply putting them in by hand.

If you need any of these (utoa comes with atou, mtoa, atom, utom, mtou; to
allow any conversion between Unix, Apple and MS DOS type text files) then
it wouldn't be too difficult to post them to CBA2.

Incidently, to get the formatting just the same as the text screen, you
will either need to view them on the text screen (so all the letters lin
up in columns) or use a non proportional font such as Apple-M.  (all the
characters are the same width)  Otherwise, the text pix (ASCII art, such
as the title to A2pro) will look off.

cheers
ntt@cleese