(OT) Mac and PC Text compatiability?

[DarkJester]

Is there any way I can get text off my home pc to a Mac computer, and keep the spacing and everything?

I've typed up a ton on my computer for my game on Saturday, and I really don't want to hand write it. So I'm emailing it to myself and going to print it off at school. I'd prefer to be able to keep all the spacing and such the same....its a lot easier on my eyes.

 

[Morrus]

I'll just slide this one over to the software forum.

 

[DanMcS]

If you copy & paste it into the body of the email, it should be fine. File attachments may not translate well (I don't know, it's been a while since I had to worry about macs), but any text in the plain text of the email should be fine. However it appears in your mac client as plain text, is how it should appear on another client.

 

[Hardhead]

Any file saved as plain text or rich text should be just peachy. Email should work just fine too. What version of the Mac OS are you running, and do you have italics, underlines, or anything else besides plain vanilla text in the document?

 

[Fast Learner]

The primary issue with plain text files between Macs and PCs is that Macs put just the Carriage Return character at the end of each line while PCs put both a Carriage Return and a Linefeed character at the end of each line. As a result some Mac text editors will show a PC-saved text file as being double-spaced, while some PC text editors will show a Mac-saved text file as all running together (one really long line).

If you can save the PC version as something other than text (like a Word file), everything will be fine. Pasting the text in the body of the email might work, though some email software automatically hard-wraps the text and you may have a mess on the Mac end.

If the Mac has Word or another decent word processor, you can simply save it as a text file on the PC (*.txt) and then open in with the Mac word processor. They tend to be a bit "smarter" than text editors (like SimpleText) and should handle the line-ends just fine.

Alternately, IIRC, the free PC application NoteTab Light will allow you to save a text file with PC, Mac, or Unix (Linefeed only) end-of-line characters.