Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
processor to another—or even from one version of a word proces
sor to the next version by the same vendor.
As a very simple example, consider what happens when you hit
the “enter” or “return” key on your keyboard. Typically, in strik
ing this key, you intend two actions to take place: The next material
should move to the next line, and it should start at the left margin.
On some machines (for example, those using the Windows operat
ing system), such an action is recorded as two separate characters
(“line feed” and “return”). On machines running Unix or Linux,
the action is recorded as a single character (“return”), and the sec
ond action is inferred. Although such details may seem remarkably
picky, they can have an effect when a file is viewed on different sys
tems. When a Windowsbased file or Windowsbased email is
viewed by a Unix or Linux machine, the viewer may treat each char
acter as designating a new line. Taken together, the result is to make
two new lines that yield double spacing. Alternatively, additional
characters may seem to appear in files—the one (“return”) is treated
normally, but the other (“line feed”) may generate an unwanted
mess (often “^M” or “20”). In contrast, when a Windowsbased
machine views a file created by Unix or Linux, the text may seem
run together without the desired spacing between lines. Thus, a
table may seem nicely formatted to a Windowsbased editor, but a
Unix viewer would not find an expected pattern of characters for
starting a new line. Instead, the file may be viewed under Unix as a
continuous stream of text without the expected line breaks or new
paragraphs, and formatted tables may appear with data from suc
cessive lines run together.
Although appearance issues can be resolved fairly easily, more
complicated problems can arise when files are opened using differ
ent operating systems. For example, files generated by one word
processing package may be unintelligible to other packages if the file
formats do not agree. The second word processor is expecting data
in one format, does not find that format, and then experiences trou
ble. Fortunately, many contemporary wordprocessing packages
recognize this difficulty and scan files to determine which of several
formats might have been tried. However, if the file does not follow
any of the known formats for that word processor, the material dis
played may appear as a random jumble—or the word processor
may simply generate an error message indicating it does not know
how to proceed.
