On Wednesday, October 22, 2003, at 09:07 PM, expatriate wrote: [snip]
It appears that the file is a word document that got encoded by the sender's mail program which runs on a Mac (correct me if I'm wrong).
[stuffit-snip]
Excellent. It works as you said. Thanks.
Being a "Mac literato" (-o: sungular; -i: plural), I'd like to give more info about the Mac files. The macintosh uses (from the beginning, in '83) a strange file format that's not compatible with any other formats. Actually a mac file is a mix of two files: a "data" file and a "resource" file. If you use a non mac-to-mac file transfer utility, only the "data" file is transferred. The resourece "fork" (as they call this splitting) holds all the user interface things: windows, text, dialog boxes, buttons, an all the things tha can belong to the program. Even the executable code is (was) a resource in the resource fork. In this way the localization is extremely easy. Just edit (with the ResEdit program) the resources, translate all the text, menus, window titles.. Resize the windows to fit the different lengths that come with translating text. A special resource holds the file code (4 characters) an file creator code (4 characters). In this way there is no need to have an extension to tell the system what type of file is and what program to launch. With OSX, having a freeBSD behind the scenes, Apple was forced to abandon this kind of "doubling". They put the file resources along with the application program in a structure named "package". The Finder (Mac's "shell") hides this and show a package as a single executable object. Actually there is a complicate directory tree structure behind this. Back to your problem. It could be solved simply telling Word to save the file as a Windows document. ;-) Bye, Ermanno Polli