Why is alignment and alignmentUnits required with text data formats?

["Costello, Roger L." <co...@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

In text data formats doesn't the first character always start at the first byte and the second character follows the first character and so forth? If yes, then why is alignment and alignmentUnit relevant? Why are they required?

/Roger

Re: Why is alignment and alignmentUnits required with text data formats?

["Beckerle, Mike" <mb...@tresys.com>]

alignment and alignmentUnit are not relevant to character set encodings. Each charset encoding specifies the alignment its characters require.  There is a section in the DFDL spec called "Mandatory Text Alignment".

Note that there are 1-bit, 3-bit, 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 7-bit encodings supported by Daffodil.
________________________________
From: Costello, Roger L. <co...@mitre.org>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2020 8:05 AM
To: users@daffodil.apache.org <us...@daffodil.apache.org>
Subject: Why is alignment and alignmentUnits required with text data formats?

Hi Folks,

In text data formats doesn't the first character always start at the first byte and the second character follows the first character and so forth? If yes, then why is alignment and alignmentUnit relevant? Why are they required?

/Roger