%modifier* n

This is the normalized newline character for text-mode files. The character is also known as the "line-feed" (ASCII 10).

Different operating systems use different sequences for newline characters:

• MS-DOS: "%13#%10#" (carriage return, line feed)
• OS/2: "%13#%10" (carriage return, line feed)
• UNIX: "%10#" (line feed)
• Windows: "%13#%10#" (carriage return, line feed)
• Windows/NT: "%13#%10#" (carriage return, line feed)
• EBCDIC systems: "#%21" (EBCDIC newline character)

When inputting a file in text-mode, the newline sequence is automatically converted to a single, line feed character. This makes programs which deal with text-mode files platform-independent. On ouput, the reverse translation is done. Thus, the OmniMark programmer sees the line feed character, but the external system sees what it expects to see for the line-end sequence.

The only modifier permitted is "s", which indicates that white-space stripping can be applied to this newline. White-space stripping is the process of collapsing sequences of white space characters to a single character. If the sequence contains a newline, the character is the newline character. Otherwise, the character is a space.