Mac OS X for Java Geeks

New Line

In the old days, developers built applications for terminal and simple daisy-wheel feed printers. They had agreed on the ASCII standard for 7-bit text encoding, with the eighth bit reserved for system specific uses (such as character-based graphics). These developers neglected, however, to specify the precise encoding for generating a new line. Some systems used a carriage return (CR) to return the printer head to the start of a new line, and then a line feed (LF) to tell the printer to roll up the paper a line.

However, many developers decided that using two characters for a line feed was wasteful and redundant. This led to the use of either a CR or LF code (but not both) to indicate the end of a line. For these developers, the single character was sufficient to tell the printer or terminal character generator that a new line should be generated. Of course, fragmentation occurred and applications didn’t always use the same line feed character, or didn’t correctly interpret documents and applications that used a different character than they were programmed to interpret.

Since then, we’ve moved to a world of WYSIWYG and GUI, where users typically associate the return key with a new paragraph break, not a new line. Today, the Windows environment is standardized on the CR/LF value (the original double-character line feed), the Classic Mac OS is standardized on the CR value, and the Unix world on LF. As you can see, this is the worst possible scenario—three major platforms ...