That is why the sequence was always sent with the CR first. The separation of the two functions concealed the fact that the print head could not return from the far right to the beginning of the next line in one-character time.
MAC TEXT FILE CR LF DRIVERS
On these systems, text was often routinely composed to be compatible with these printers, since the concept of device drivers hiding such hardware details from the application was not yet well developed applications had to talk directly to the teletype machine and follow its conventions. The sequence CR+LF was in common use on many early computer systems that had adopted teletype machines, typically an ASR33, as a console device, because this sequence was required to position those printers at the start of a new line. If you're curious, as I was, about the historical basis for these decisions, Wikipedia delivers all the newline trivia you could possibly want, and more: Pretty much business as usual in computing.
MAC TEXT FILE CR LF MANUAL
The Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF) terms derive from manual typewriters, and old printers based on typewriter-like mechanisms (typically referred to as "Daisywheel" printers).
But newlines aren't a universally accepted standard they are different depending who you ask, and what platform they happen to be computing on: The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines.ĭid you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly never thought much about them. The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline?