On Wednesday, October 22, 2003, at 03:50 AM, expatriate wrote:
Greetings I just got this file with a .doc extension. OpenOffice has no idea how to open it. The 'file' command yields "AppleSingle encoded Macintosh file". I did a bit of research and found there are filters that allow one to extract the word document from within it.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). Not having the time to download/compile the filters I used strings to get the text sans formatting. My question is: Is there something I can tell the sender to do in order for me to receive the file "normally" ? In other words, as if a Windows user had sent me a word document? TIA & Cheers
What I usually do is save the file as a .rtf to eliminate the confusion. Not perfect on the mac though. Still loses some of the formatting sometimes. Abiword seems to give me the best viewing in SuSE. It could also be a compressed file which the compression extension was dropped. i.e. document.doc.bin or document.doc.hqx. or .sit. Could be from having the 'hide extension' enabled in the documents info/properties tag. There used to be a program for os9 from dataviz that translated programs by changing the .extension. You type the new format and it converted for you. OS10 still uses the same program for conversion, but I haven't seen it work in that way anymore. It just seems to be a plugin for programs that do these things. I know winzip(M$) and stuffit (M$, mac, linux-don't know if the feature works in linux) will compress using this feature. I don't know of any reason the mail program would perform this function but, Some mac programs just don't want to play nice. Almost as bad as windders, at least one can choose which way it doesn't play nice. For what it's worth. will