Attachments to text newsgroup posts, was Phase shift oscillator - Phase_Shift_Osc.asc

Ya pays for what ya gets. ...Jim Thompson

Technically, posting binaries to text groups is usually considered abuse. Or at least it used to be many years ago. If somebody wanted to give you a hard time, they could file an abuse report and Giganews would probably warn you.

See

"Does Giganews censor Usenet newsgroups? Giganews does not censor any newsgroup carried on our servers. The only exception will be binary posts sent to 'text' newsgroups or articles identified by our filters as clearly being Spam."

John Fields expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The problem is that the LTspice *.asc file is _not_ always plain ascii text. If you have components with uF units, you'll get the mu character in the file, in place of the "u", which is hex B5.

...

The mu character is hex B5 and as such _is_ 8-bit ASCII. You can write a script to put the original "u" back in its place, to make it work, but this is a nuisance to be sure.

There is a LTspice option to turn mu off for the net list but this doesn't help the *.asc file.

Warren

Nary a problem. Thanks! ...Jim Thompson

"8-bit ASCII" is an oxymoron. If the "mu" character is hex B5, you're using ISO-8859-1 (or something very similar, e.g. Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-15).

Nobody expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@nowhere.com:

Sure. To be clearer, my use of the term simply meant NON 7-bit ASCII.

Warren

Thanks. :-) But I'll bet I'll screw it up again. :-(

Posting the text into the body of the post does seem to work universally. But it sure is nice to have an attachment that can be directly saved to disk and then launched, rather than having to cut and paste it into a file, save and then launch it. So it would be nice if the posters add the attachment to the post which already contains the plaintext in the body. I don't know if that is a lot of extra work for the posters or not. My experience is limited to attaching using Thunderbird, and that's easy, but I can't speak for other apps.

Ed

OK. But i see every post and the phase_shift_osc attachment works for = all of them.

Astraweb service, Agent 6 in wine on opensuse 11.1.

There are two broad sides to the question. The one trying to communicate with others; and others who wish to receive such communications.

An author will probably like to reach a broader audience than a small one, when posting to what amounts to a global cork-board like newsgroups. (Email works well if the intended audience is tiny.)

Those reading have much content to skim, so anything that saves time is important. Being forced to change operating systems, news readers, news providers, just to grab a post is more likely to limit its audience than it is to cause people to go out and change what they've invested time learning to do or are paying for and comfortable with.

A text newsgroup should probably avoid attachments, per se. But inserting LTspice .ASC text, inline, seems okay, if not too long. And the usual ASCII drawings....

I'm glad you see them. I don't. I'm not sure I care enough about missing this one that I'm going to change to astraweb and wine on opensuse 11.1.

Ultimately, it is up to each of us. Authors can decide how much effort they want to spend and readers will then decide the same thing for themselves.

Jon

That's a result of special processing in Agent, and a news provider with a tolerant binaries policy.

Most other newsreaders would only see Field's post as a simple (no MIME headers or section delimiters) post with a uuencoded file as a block of text stuck on the end after the sig file. If they saw it at all, as most binary filtering news servers would have dropped it.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)