Thanks for your reply.

As a clarification, I was told that the specification I was provided would probably never change (or would at least require an act of the Oregon State Government to change it). There are perhaps hundreds of machines that use this particular format, so I feel reasonably safe hard-coding a few things.

My goal is to localize all of the hard-coded items in one place to minimize the risk you mention.

As for the column ranges, this is the way they are portrayed in the specification (ie. as a range of numbers like [59 .. 63]. I plan on calculating the column widths based upon the values that I am supplied, and then constructing the pack specification from that.