About line data

Read through the following sections to become familiar with line-data terms.

Note: Throughout this chapter references are made to ACIF because the line2afp command is linked to the acif command. When you use this transform and if errors occur, you might receive some error messages that make reference to ACIF. See the ACIF User's Guide for more information about the ACIF command.

In this section:

  1. What Is line data?
  2. ANSI and machine carriage controls
    In many environments (including IBM mainframes and most minicomputers), printable data normally contains a carriage control character. The carriage control character acts as a vertical tab command to position the paper at the start of a new page, at a specified line on the page, or to control skipping to the next line. The characters can be one of two types: ANSI carriage control or machine carriage control.
  3. Variable-length and