As part of the standard Mail protocol (RFC 821 by Jon Postal), all
mail is sent through the Internet with the <CR><LF> as the End of
Line (EOL) character. It is up to the local client program to
translate the <CR><LF> EOL to the correct EOL for that particular
platform. For Windows, the standard is <CR><LF>. For Unix, it is
<LF>. The problem comes with the Mac. Before OS X, the Mac's EOL
character is just a <CR>.
However, OS X has made things a bit more complex. On the "Mac" side
of OS X, the EOL is still (sort of) officially <CR>. On the Unix side
of OS X, it is the Unix <LF> character. However, even most Mac
applications now use the Unix <LF> as their official EOL character.
This includes TextEdit and Mail.app when you save a file as "Text
Only". I guess the assumption is that if you insist on saving a file
as "text only", you probably want to run some Unix commands on them,
and therefore you want Unix line endings. Neither application has
problems reading in files that have either <CR> or <CR><LF> as their
EOL character.
So, when you use Mail.app as your Mail client, it converts the
<CR><LF> of the raw mail data into <LF>. Thus, LaTeX is happy since
the files are in a format it understands.
The problem is Eudora which is probably making the assumption that
text files on the Mac should use <CR> as the EOL character.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to solve this particular issue, and
in fact, it was this very issue that made me give up on Eudora and
switch to Mail.app. However, this is probably not the solution you're
looking for.
I searched the Web and found this webpage that has some downloadable
scripts that look like they work in Eudora, and can convert files to
use the LF ending: <
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/chang/EudoraGPG/>.
The other suggestion I have is to use Mac's version of "vi" on the
file before you run LaTex on them. Mac's "vi" has the ability to
quickly convert files from one line ending to another. Simply ":set
ff=unix", then ":wq" and the file is using the correct line endings.
I was looking for another program found on most Unix installations
called dos2unix and its sister program mac2unix, but they apparently
not on the Unix distributed with Mac OS X. However, I did write this
little Perl script that should help:
#! /usr/bin/env perl
while (<>) {
s/\r/\n/g;
print;
}
This Perl script takes input either directly from STDIN or from the
files on the command line, converts the line endings from <CR> to
<LF>, and prints them out on STDOUT. You can then take this output
and pipe it directly into LaTeX.
$ mac2unix mailfile.bib | latex
(I assume LaTeX uses STDIN since all other Unix utilities do. If not,
you can redirect the output of mac2unix to a file and use that file
for latex).
I hope this clarifies what is going on with Eudora, and you'll find
this solution helpful.
=======================================
Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor,
and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it."
-- Elwood P. Dowd
=======================================
David Weintraub
david
weintraubworld.net
david
weintraub.name
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