Text Files on Linux

Your Atari text files may be ordinary plain text (the kind you can double-click and "Show" in GEM) or they could have some formatting.

Plain Text

For plain text files, there are three issues to consider:

• Line breaks. The standard line break on the Atari ST (and on MSDOS and Windows) is a carriage return (0x0D) followed by a line feed (0x0A). On Linux and other Unix systems, it's just a line feed (0x0A). The Unix utility fromdos will convert the linebreaks for you. (There's a comparable todos that works in the other direction). Some editors (e.g. vim) automatically handle line break differences for you.
• Encoding. The Atari ST character set has some interesting characters in its upper half, not all of which are present in the usual iso8859-1 or iso8859-15 that Linux has been using recently. You should be able to use GNU recode to perform a conversion to unicode with the code: "recode AtariST..UTF-8 <file>"
• Formatting. There may be some characters that work with the ST's vt52 emulator to control the formatting of the text. Some of these characters will have the same effect on an xterm or the Linux console, but others will be misinterpreted.

Formatted Text

Formatted text can come in any number of application specific formats:

• 1st Word (Plus). This can be converted to RTF with the program wpls2rtf.

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