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I use both W7 and Mac OSX on several machines, with sugarsync to sync files and directories. So far no problem. However txt files created by W7 Notepad are displayed differently with Mac TextEdit. And when I edit the file with TextEdit, it looks different again in W7 Notepad. Edits in Notepad again look different on the Mac. Problem areas are: - tabs - carriage returns - fonts.

I use and edit one particular txt file on a daily basis: services.txt (here I keep all my web accounts etc).

What can I do to keep these exactly the same whilst editing on either Mac or W7? thanks Peter

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  1. Tabs: I'm not sure what's happening here. Have you checked if one platform is turning them into spaces?
  2. Carriage returns: Yeah. There are three types of line breaks, old (Mac OS 9-ish) Mac ("CR"), Windows ("CRLF"), and Unix ("LF"). I'm sure the two platforms disagree on this (the Mac would be using Unix line breaks nowadays).
  3. Fonts: This you can't fix. Since you're working with TXT files, font information isn't stored in the files; by definition plain text has no formatting data.

For the first two problems, you should get a slightly more sophisticated text editor. I'm sure this could be fixed from either platform, but since I'm a Mac user, TextWrangler is a good, free, very sophisticated text editor designed for programmers. It has preferences which will allow you to match Windows's line breaks and fool around with your tabs a bit.

If you're particularly interested in maintaining formatting, though, it's time to switch from TXT to RTF. :)

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