Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1488

Here in alt.folklore.computers,

Not really. End of Line characters are often handled automagically when one transfers a file between systems (say via FTP in "text" mode) or sometimes even by the editor one is using (some editors, like pico, will automatically read files that use different conventions and save them with the EOL format used on the platform it is running on).

I've used a wide variety of platforms concurrently in the past, being an OS-2, Windows, Linux, BeOS, and sometimes FreeBSD and Solaris user at home while also being a MacOS, TSO, Solaris, and OS2200 user at work over a period of several years, and text files were never an issue.

PDF files, on the other hand, were (and are) almost totally unreadable on those platforms (OS2200, TSO) which have no PDF reader to speak of, and even those platforms which have *some* native PDF support (Adobe produced a native v3.0 Acrobat reader for OS-2 and the v4.x and v5.x Win32 versions of Acrobat will work under the Odin Win32 API translator) sometimes have serious issues with newer documents.

I've run across several PDFs that I can't read here under OS-2 at all due to font issues, for example.

That depends on the platform you're using. A spec is one thing, but having actual working software is another thing entirely.

I have a hundred tools under OS-2 (and a few dozen under OS2200) which can read and write ASCII text flawlessly, but the number of programs that will read PDF under OS-2 can be counted on one hand, and OS2200 has none of those tools at all.

-- OS-2 + eCS + Linux + Win95 + DOS + PC-GEOS + Executor = PC Hobbyist Heaven! WARNING: I've seen FIELDATA FORTRAN V and I know how to use it! The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.