Re: moving DVI files from ASCII to EBCDIC

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Article #1957

#1957

From: C.E. Thompson
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 1992 21:48

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In article <1992Sep1.035118.28210@hemlock.cray.com>, marc@hemlock.cray.com
(Marc Bouron) writes:
|> 
|> I *hate* to sound like I'm supporting IBM (I'm not!), but hasn't
anybody heard
|> of variable (V) and undefined (U) length records on IBM mainframes?  I have
|> transferred DVI files to VB datasets and sent them through a DVI2TTY driver
|> quite sucessfully.  Remember: not every IBM dataset is 80-byte, fixed
length!

Yes, some of us have heard of them :-) The TeX implementation I developed 
for the local MVS mainframe will write DVI files with any of those record
formats. The standard TeX command there does default them to being RECFM=FB,
LRECL=80 though. This is partly historical (we used to pour them down 
virtual card punches to get to external DVI-eating software, so it was
convenient for them to be chopped up into 80-byte records already) but
has some advantages when copying them around. The effects of removing
"trailing spaces" from a DVI file that has been chopped up into arbitrary
sized records can be quite strange!

Chris Thompson
Cambridge University Computing Service
JANET:    cet1@uk.ac.cam.phx
Internet: cet1@phx.cam.ac.uk

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References: <1992Aug28.144526.27967@news.th-darmstadt.de> <715264965snx@n5ial.chi.il.us> <1992Sep1.035118.28210@hemlock.cray.com>

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!cam-cl!cam-cl!cet1
From: cet1@cl.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: moving DVI files from ASCII to EBCDIC
Message-ID: <1992Sep1.214858.3077@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Sep 92 21:48:58 GMT
References: <1992Aug28.144526.27967@news.th-darmstadt.de> <715264965snx@n5ial.chi.il.us> <1992Sep1.035118.28210@hemlock.cray.com>
Sender: pb@cl.cam.ac.uk (Piete Brooks)
Reply-To: cet1@cl.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson)
Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK
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