[sac-forum] Re: Beta testers needed for SAC database

On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 23:31:36 -0700, Steve Coe wrote:

> Once I am at the release point, probably version 7.5, you are certainly
> welcome to convert the SAC deep sky database to this format.  Is it more
> useful to Unix users?  If so, that would be great.

This is not Unix.  It is Unicode which is used by Windows, Mac, and
Unix.  It replaces ASCII and it's 8-bit extensions.  UTF-8 is the 8-bit
encoding of Unicode (Microsoft uses UTF-16 in their filesystem names,
which is a 16-bit encoding).  If you stick with 7-bit ASCII (these two
words are redundant), the encoding between ASCII and UTF-8 are identical.

The only caveat with UTF-8 is once you go beyond ASCII, the size and
length of strings are no longer the same.

> I really am going to try and make certain that the format of version 7.43
> does not change before release.  So, if the columns are going to stay the
> same, you can get started on how you will convert this and practice so that
> in 6 weeks or so that conversion will go smoothly.  I am planning on giving
> the beta checkers that long to look it over.
> 
> The only columns that might be added would for the page numbers of
> Uranometria version 2.


        -Paul

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