Mailing List Formats
Document Formats
Image Formats
A Note for Mac Users
Foreign Language / Extended Character Sets
Compression and Encoding Schemes
At Westminster we have developed the experience and the reputation of being able to handle data in almost any format. In fact our data people see previously unheard of formats as a stimulating challenge.
A record layout is a helpful tool when sending us a data file. A record layout is our road-map to your data. It tells us how many fields of data you have supplied, their lengths and the type of information they contain.
If your file contains fields which are not required for the job we are required to do, let us know that too. You'll save us valuable time, and potentially avoid serious problems. For example a file that has a field that is empty for the first 9,500 of a 10,000 name file might not get that field printed on an address label if the operator mistakenly assumes that it is not required. But if those 500 records all have a suite number in the field... well you get the picture!
The more information you can provide us the better it is for everyone. If you don't supply us with any information we will always do our best, but as in the above example, sometimes that still isn't good enough.
Acceptable Mailing List Formats
The following formats will always be acceptable. Other file formats may be usable at no extra charge but you should check first. Custom programming or other non-productive time required to work with your files will be billable.
- ASCII Delimited Text (almost any delimiters are OK)
- ASCII Fixed Length Text (CR/LF optional)
- EBCDIC Fixed Length Text (Labelled or Unlabelled)
- DBase III or IV DBF files (or compatible)
- Word Perfect Secondary Merge Files
- MSAccess
- MSExcel
Acceptable Document Formats
Document files are used to set up the text for laser personalised letters and forms. While we should have no problem reading the following formats on our systems, there is no guarantee that we will have exactly the same fonts as are specified in your original. We do however have many different fonts available and will do our best to find the closest match.
The following formats will always be acceptable. Other file formats may be usable at no extra charge but you should check first. Custom programming or other non-productive time required to work with your files will be billable.
- ASCII Text
- Word Perfect
- Word
- PDF
Acceptable Image Formats
Image files are normally used to provide signatures and logos for use in laser personalised letters. The following formats will always be acceptable. Other file formats may be usable at no extra charge but you should check first. Custom programming or other non-productive time required to work with your files will be billable.
- Bitmap Files (.bmp)
- Uncompressed TIFF Files (.tif)
- GIF Files (.gif)
- JPEG Files (.jpg)
Note: We do not accept EPS files because of the many different flavours in which they are produced. Similarly compressed TIFF files are sometimes OK and then again, sometimes they're not so why take a chance!
A Note for Mac Users
While we have the ability to read and write Mac files on our DOS machines, we have no Mac software available. All data must be exported from your native software to ASCII text files before it is sent to us, otherwise it will probably be unusable.
While any field delimiters are acceptable, the Mac standard of separating fields with TAB charachters is just fine with us.
Foreign Language / Extended Character Sets
French accents and other extended characters are represented on different computer platforms in different ways. There are presently dozens of ways in which the same character can be represented in either ASCII or EBCDIC notations.
While our system will automatically handle many of the most common representations of these characters, a character map can save us hours of work if you have one available. This is especially true of files being transferred from mainframe computers.
File Compression and Encoding
We encourage the use of file compression programs to minimize transmission time, reduce the number of diskettes we handle, and to detect data corruption that occurs during transmission of the file via modem or the internet, (corrupt files don't decompress properly).
We support the following compression/packaging formats:
- PKZIP / PKUNZIP (DOS / Windows)
- PKARC / PKUNARC (DOS / Windows)
- compress / uncompress (Unix)
- tar and cpio (Unix)
We support the following file encoding / encryption formats:
- PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
- Mime encode / decode
- UU encode / decode
- XX encode / decode
- Base 64 encode / decode
- BinHex encode / decode
