2. Introduction

Why an ASCII-text-converter?

Did you ever try to edit a MS-DOS-text with a MS-Windows-editor?
Or a Windows-text with OS/2?
Or a Macintosh-text with an Amiga?

If you can answer one or more of these questions with YES,
you already got the answer;-)


Well, the real cause is the following:

The ASCII-charset (ASCII=Amercian Standard Code For Information
Interchange) isn´t defined very exactly. Only the first 127 chars
are equal for all computer systems, the rest varies from computer
system to computer system (in this range are the most special chars and
umlauts placed).
Also the code for a line feed is different at the several system
platforms:


Charsets:

 ANSI ASCII:   Amiga, UNIX, Windows
 PC-850 ASCII: MS-DOS, OS/2 *
 MAC ASCII:    Apple Macintosh **
 ATARI ASCII:  Atari ***

 *   The PC-850 charset is also known as IBM-charset
 **  The Macintosh-charset is similar to the ANSI-ASCII charset
 *** The Atari-charset is similar to the PC-850 charset


Linefeed code:

 Amiga,UNIX:              LF 
 DOS,OS/2,Windows, Atari: CR+LF 
 Mac:                     CR


When you want to transfer text files between these systems you have to
bring the files into the right shape, and for this a converter like
TextConv is needed.

It´s important to know that this conversion usually causes losses;
that means, as example, if a MS-DOS-text becomes converted to the
Amiga format and than back to the MS-DOS-format, the new and the old
file are not identically. The reason for this is that the Amiga
does not have some specific PC-characters (graphics chars,for example).
During conversion, this chars are converted to similar Amiga-chars,
so that the original char is lost. The same priciple is valid for
Macintosh- or Atari-texts.
If, for example, an Atari-Text should be converted to the
Macintosh-format, it isn´t useful to convert the text first into the
Amiga-format (to read it with the Amiga or something else) and
then convert it from the Amiga- to the Atari-format, because
there are losses on the way from Atari to Amiga AND from Amiga to
Macintosh.
The conversion should always take the original file as source.