I have a situation where I wish to import a file and have the line endings and the spaces honored as in \typefile. But I want any font changes (e.g. \it) honored as well. I tried the plain TeX commands \obeylines and \obeyspaces. The line endings and typeface changes were honored but the spaces were not. Is there a convenient way to do this? I can preprocess the file through e.g. sed to patch in \crlf and hard spaces but this seems a bit clumsy. BTW this is text in columns. The length of every line is limited to 45 characters. -- John Culleton Able Indexing and Typesetting Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost. Satisfaction guaranteed. http://wexfordpress.com