CrossDOS Commodity

The CrossDOS commodity, illustrated in Figure 11-1, controls text options for the active CrossDOS drives. The CrossDOS commodity window shows the available drives and allows you to set Text Filtering or Text Translation separately for each.

Figure 11-1.

CrossDOS Commodity Window

The scrolling list on the left lists the device names of currently mounted (active) CrossDOS drives. Select a drive to display its setting.

Note:

The Text Filtering and Translation options should be selected only to transfer text files with CrossDOS. Turn these options off when transferring font, graphics, or binary files to avoid altering their data.

Text Filtering

The Text Filtering option filters carriage returns and end-of-file (EOF) markers in text files transferred through CrossDOS. MS-DOS text files normally have a carriage return (Ctrl+M) followed by a linefeed (Ctrl+J) at the end of a line. MS-DOS files can also have one or more end-of-file markers (Ctrl+Z) at the end of the file.

Amiga text files only need linefeeds and Amiga files do not use EOFs. Selecting the Text Filtering option adds carriage returns before linefeeds and places an EOF at the end of the text when you write to an MS-DOS disk. It removes EOFs and carriage returns before linefeeds when reading from an MS-DOS disk.

Text Translation

The Text Translation option controls the translation between the Amiga and MS-DOS character sets where they differ. Some MS-DOS files set the high bit of certain ASCII characters in the file to give that character a special meaning. Selecting Text Translation with ASCII-7 in the Translation Types gadget makes the file conform to standard ASCII text. Text Translation only filters the high bit when reading the file from an MS-DOS disk. It does not set the high bit when writing the file to the MS-DOS disk.

There are two types of Text Translation:

Complete	To filter file names as well as the data in the file, select the Text Translation option and make a selection in the Translation Types cycle gadget.
File Name Only	To filter only the file names, do not select the Text Translation option. However, you must make a selection from the Translation Types cycle gadget.

Translation Types

The Translation Types cycle gadget allows you to select one of the following choices for text filtering or translation:

ASCII-7	Makes the file conform to standard ASCII text.
INTL (International)	Preserves international characters (for example, ü, ç, ê).
DANSK	Filters Danish text files.
MAC	Filters Apple Macintosh ASCII files that have been transferred to an MS-DOS disk.