[Cif2-encoding] [ddlm-group] options/text vs binary/end-of-line . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .

[James Hester]

Herbert, you will note that I carefully wrote "de-facto" ASCII, by
which I mean that virtually, if not all, software for doing "useful
work" with CIF, such as structural display programs, syntax checkers,
refinement programs etc. read and write ASCII only.  So while you can
produce an EBCDIC or UTF16 encoded CIF1 file and proudly proclaim that
it is CIF1 conformant, good luck in your quest to do useful work with
it: you won't be able to input it as a starting model in any
crystallographic packages, CheckCIF will complain, you won't be able
to display the structure in all those nice programs...so in practice
you are restricted to ASCII.  As an additional and far more
significant restriction, regardless of your CIF1 encoding, you must
use only characters appearing in the ASCII character set in your CIF
file.

My point being that UTF8-only CIF2 is *less* restrictive than the
successful CIF1 standard, because more code points are available, with
the same range of encoding schemes (i.e. effectively *one* encoding
only).

If the only non-UTF8 use case will be imgCIF (that would appear to be
the only non-ASCII use case for CIF1), we need to discuss this
explicitly.

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Herbert J. Bernstein
<yaya at bernstein-plus-sons.com> wrote:
> Um, but CIF1 is _not_ ascii-only.  It is text in any acceptable local
> encoding.
>
> =====================================================
>  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
>    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
>         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769
>
>                  +1-631-244-3035
>                  yaya at dowling.edu
> =====================================================
>
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