Re: How to change line endings - where is it explained?

[Lennart Borgman]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Oh, I found it! But I did not see it before. The reason is that I am 
> > nearly always searching, not reading.
> >     
>
> That is almost certainly not the right way to use the manual.
> Searching is a vehicle of getting to the right node, but once you are
> already there, you should read it in its entirety.
>   
Maybe it is a little bit a matter of cognitive style? It is really hard 
to organize a big text like Emacs manual and I tend to think that maybe 
I am not in the right node and then I continue searching. Sometimes this 
is the best approach I believe and sometimes not. This time it was 
certainly not the best strategy I was using, you are right in that.

It might well be that most people doing some programming tend to have a 
cognitive style that is more consistent with the reading style you suggest.

> I actually dislike the term "line endings"; "end-of-line format" is a
> better term, IMO.
>   
If you dislike that term I suppose that there are more native English 
speaking people that does that. But there is one drawback with the term 
"end-of-line format" and that is that there is a function with that 
name. It makes searching a little bit harder, perhaps. However I would 
be glad if one term was use consistently in the manual. That makes my 
way of reading the manual (=searching) quite a bit more easy.

> ??? How can that be?  Are we talking about the same thing here?
> Here's the fragment I had in mind:
>
>        Each of the listed coding systems has three variants which specify
>     exactly what to do for end-of-line conversion:
>
>     `...-unix'
>          Don't do any end-of-line conversion; assume the file uses newline
>          to separate lines.  (This is the convention normally used on Unix
>          and GNU systems.)
>   
...
> > like in
> >
> >     M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system RET unix RET
> >
> > As I understand it this changes just the line endings to unix style 
> > (LF). Would it not be good to mention this feature?
> >     
>
> Ah, you mean this paragraph (from "Text Coding"):
>
>        You can also use this command to specify the end-of-line conversion
>     (*note end-of-line conversion: Coding Systems.) for encoding the
>     current buffer.  For example, `C-x <RET> f dos <RET>' will cause Emacs
>     to save the current buffer's text with DOS-style CRLF line endings.
>   
Yes, that is more in line with what I was searching for. And looked for 
in the node "(emacs) Coding Systems".

To summarize: What I would have found most useful would have been one 
consistent term for "line endings"/"end-of-line 
conversions"/"end-of-line type" since this makes searching easier.

Thanks for taking time with this. It cleared my thoughts a bit.