Text File Format

Most files in the firemodels repositories are text files adhering to unix/linux formatting conventions; that is, they don't have line feed, LF, or carriage return/line feed, CRLF, characters embedded at the end of each line.

The files in the repository make use of unicode UTF-8 encoding, but most, especially source code, conform to the 256 ASCII character set. Use special characters only when absolutely necessary, in particular within FDS input files because it is not always clear how these characters are interpreted by the Fortran compiler.

Most modern text editors support UTF-8 encoding. However, the default for the editor vim used within the unix/linux operating system is not always UTF-8. You can see what your default encoding is by typing

:set

when vi editing a file. To change the default behavior, add

set encoding=utf-8

to your .vimrc file. If you use PuTTY to remotely access a unix/linux computer, when setting up a session, go to Category: Window > Translation and change the character set to UTF-8 and make sure that the line drawing characters use Unicode as well.

Here are some useful unicode characters:

x² is made by typing x and then ALT+0178

x³ is made by typing x and then ALT+0179

°C is made by typing ALT+0176 and then C