PARSEC Technical Information

Experience has shown us that cutting and pasting (cut-&-paste) text from these Wiki pages might have variable, undesirable results in your VMS terminal emulation window (PuTTY, Reflection, TeraTerm, etc.).

This is simply due to a decades-wide range of minor incompatibilities between terminal emulation software (which is intentionally ANSI-standards-compliant, but lives in a windowing environment) and various host operating system platforms, including Windows, Linux and even Unix.

This is not a fatal problem – Although your results may vary from what we're warning about here, none of these problems should prove to be a serious hindrance or flaw in your attempts to cut-&-paste text from various pages on this PARSEC Wiki site. Just be careful – “Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV).”

In particular:

• You may select-&-copy a line, or several lines, of text from a page.
  

• The line(s) may contain various punctuation characters, particularly “double-quote-marks“ or (parentheses). The problems tend to show up with more complicated lines which involve multiple quotes and/or parentheses groups.
  

• When you paste that selected/copied text into a VMS terminal emulator – say, onto a command line (following a $-prompt) or into a text editor buffer, the pasted text may not be exactly the same as the line(s) you selected/cut.
  

• Compare each selected/copy line carefully with what results in your terminal window's paste operation.
  

• Make manual changes/fixes to make the pasted line match the selected/copied line exactly.

The Wiki page contains an example like this, which you select-&-copy:

$ WRITE sys$output “This is: ” + RED + BOLD + “red & bold text ” + NORM + “…but now back to normal.”

When you paste it onto your DCL command line, it might look like this:

$ WRITE sys$output This is:  + RED + BOLD + red & bold text  + NORM + ...but now back to normal.

Note that all of the double-quote-marks have disappeared! Why? Who knows!!…

Fix? Just edit your command line to put these back, just as in the original.

This annoying behavior is rare, and yet unpredictable. Just be careful to always cross-check what you've pasted into your DCL command line or text editor buffer against the original line(s) from the Wiki page. Fix where necessary. Hopefully, you won't see this bad behavior too often.