It is good to maintain some documentation for the sequence since over time you may forget what your clever filename means. Which ever of these methods you use you must still Reformat the sequence file before GCG will accept it. In this example I have retreived a sequence file from the old EuGene program. You should always check to see that you get what you think you should. There are two kinds of computer files.
Binary files are things like executable programs and many graphics files.
They use the entire 8 bit character set. Other editors such as MS Word and WordPerfect use the 8th bit to include formating information such as bold and underline. Therefore if you try to use a document file from these editors GCG will choke. Any information on the line other than the two periods is lost during reformatting. The dividing line may be omitted if there is absolutely no heading.