Will line spaces be an issue?

[proto-man]

Hi,

I'm currently using Windows but would like to switch over to Linux. Only problem is that I won't be able to leave Windows completely behind, because the school computers are Windows. I heard that Linux and Windows have different characters for line spaces. Will this cause problems down the road (like editing a document on my Linux, taking it to school, and seeing a completely differently formatted document in the Windows school computers?)

How do you guys deal with this, or is it not even an issue?

[aldld]

I have had problems with lines in text files, but I've never had any problem with things like OpenOffice files.So for school this probably won't be a big problem.

[i92guboj]

Hi,

I'm currently using Windows but would like to switch over to Linux. Only problem is that I won't be able to leave Windows completely behind, because the school computers are Windows. I heard that Linux and Windows have different characters for line spaces. Will this cause problems down the road (like editing a document on my Linux, taking it to school, and seeing a completely differently formatted document in the Windows school computers?)

How do you guys deal with this, or is it not even an issue?

This only affects plain text files (i.e. the kind of file you can view and edit in your notepad). The rest of the files which have a proper format should work ok, as long as you have a program that's compatible with that format.

If you are not sure, you can ask here for concrete formats, and someone around will probably be able to tell you how to deal with them in Linux.

About the plain text files, there are tools to convert between the two formats. And, in windows, I think that you can view plain text files correctly in the wordpad when the line endings are screwed in the notepad.

The only difference is that in linux we use a line feed mark to end a line (logical, isn't it?) while windows uses two characters instead of one: line feed + carriage return.

[elija]

If you do have a problem with text files you will see them in Notepad on one oline with those squares where every new line should be. Wordpad will open them correctly in Windows.

I have never had a problem going the other way.

[edit]
Actually, CR+LF is an old standard. On the old printers and terminals, CR (carriage return) sent the print head or cursor back to the beginning of the current line and LF (line feed) sent it to the current position on the next line. Therefore both were required to position the cursor at the beginning of the next line.

CR + LF in that context actually makes far more sense than just one or the other
[/edit]

[vsemaska]

On Linux there are utilities to convert those text files from Windows to Linux (or UNIX) and visa-versa. They're call dos2unix & unix2dos.