Old said:
When I save a document in the text format, I get a box that asks
several questions: Text encoding with three options, and then Insert
line breaks?, and allow character substitution?
What does this all mean?
The text encoding options control how the characters in the document are
translated to numeric values stored in the file. For almost all purposes,
the default choice of "Windows" is the appropriate one. The "MS-DOS" choice
is almost the same, except that some of the numbers are generated
differently.
The "Other encoding" list is for languages that use non-Roman symbols or
other special circumstances. If you see a warning that "Text marked in red
will not save correctly in the chosen encoding", choose the "Other encoding"
option and then choose one that makes the warning disappear. Unicode UTF-8
is usually a safe choice.
The "Insert line breaks" option puts a carriage return at the end of each
line of text as it's displayed in Print Layout view. This preserves the line
endings, which is useful if you're sending the text file to a mainframe or
to an old program that uses a specific number of characters per line. You
can also choose whether the inserted line-ends are only a carriage return
(character 13), only a line feed (character 10), or both in either order.
I'm not sure what Word does for character substitution, but I think it's a
good thing to stay away from. Use Unicode UTF-8 and you shouldn't have to
worry about it.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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