Apple .doc file, appeal to Mac literati
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
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
expatriate wrote:
The 'file' command yields "AppleSingle encoded Macintosh file".
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).
My question is: Is there something I can tell the sender to do in order for me to receive the file"normally" ?
Yes, the sender should set his mailer to AppleSingle encoding if the receiver is a Mac user, and to Base64 encoding if the receiver is a Linux or Windows user. On the other hand, there is a Linux version of Stuffit, that deals with this kind of encoding issues. Go to http://www.stuffit.com, click the Linux link in the upper right corner, and eventually you are led to the download of stuffit520.611linux-i386.tar.gz. After unpacking, you'll find the files 'stuff' and 'unstuff' that are to be executed directly, so there's no need to compile. Just execute unstuff <filename> The program itself will detect what kind of file it is. S.H.
Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
expatriate wrote:
The 'file' command yields "AppleSingle encoded Macintosh file".
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).
My question is: Is there something I can tell the sender to do in order for me to receive the file"normally" ?
Yes, the sender should set his mailer to AppleSingle encoding if the receiver is a Mac user, and to Base64 encoding if the receiver is a Linux or Windows user.
On the other hand, there is a Linux version of Stuffit, that deals with this kind of encoding issues. Go to http://www.stuffit.com, click the Linux link in the upper right corner, and eventually you are led to the download of stuffit520.611linux-i386.tar.gz.
After unpacking, you'll find the files 'stuff' and 'unstuff' that are to be executed directly, so there's no need to compile. Just execute
unstuff <filename>
The program itself will detect what kind of file it is.
S.H.
Excellent. It works as you said. Thanks.
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
participants (4)
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Ermanno Polli
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expatriate
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Sjoerd Hiemstra
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will