lingua franca, was email format, mac -> PC file conv.

[gastineau@badgerden.com (John E. Gastineau)]

We had this file format/email format discussion several years ago, 
and resolved nothing, and I suppose we will resolve little now. 

Agreeing on a single format is as likely as Europe deciding on a 
single language. One day,  but things are too entrenched to enforce 
it now. 

What we need is an agreement to communicate in some form. If we need 
a phys-l-tex mailing list, I'm sure someone will set it up. But 
recognize that we'll shut out a significant number of people who 
won't or can't deal with a Tex file. We haven't, thankfully, done 
that. Note that I could have used html, Word 6, rtf or pdf instead of 
Tex, so I'm not picking on Tex. 

When someone has a long point to make that requires lots of equations 
or pictures (and that's fine) then that writer needs to figure out 
what format is appropriate for distribution. Today that often means 
multiple formats if you want to reach a wide audience.

To pick up Brad Shue's comment in another mailing, that Office97 etc. 
is making problems for Win3.1 users, that's just my point. You can't 
expect the widest number of people to read your stuff if you use a 
very new format. 

Of course, we need to draw the line somewhere and say that a format 
dating from, say four years back, is recent enough that everyone can 
be expected to read it. We don't distribute software on 5.25" 
floppies so everyone can read it--we hardly even distribute software 
on floppies any more. 

So, for the email format thing, we need to use a format that can be 
read by lots and lots of people if we want this to be a public forum. 
If you and a group of friends are satisfied with just one another's 
opinions, then set up phys-l-pagemaker for lots of layout 
flexibility. Otherwise, I think we are stuck with plain text for a 
while. Once the new email readers such as in Netscape Communicator 
become widespread, then we can have some (more) fun. At the moment, 
to consider using any format that requires any more effort that just 
opening the mailer and clicking on a message to read it seems folly 
to me. I for one won't decode, translate, and decompress 15 email 
messages a day for long. 

(Recognize that this is spoken by a guy who usually wants the latest 
OS, the latest version of everything to get those neat new bells and 
whistles. But I'm not using Office97 because the people I'm writing 
for right now can't use those files. Communication is the goal.)

Similarly on the document exchange thing, be it mac/pc or just pc to 
pc and mac to mac, two people have to agree to communicate. That 
probably will  mean not using Word97 format, but something that MOST 
people can read, such as Word6 which can be read by nearly any word 
processor, including Mac Word 5.1. (Of  course, that's where I draw 
the line. Anyone want to insist on WordStar?  Preferably on 320K  5.25" 
disks? ;-) )

Below I'll  take a stab at Brad's PC/Mac questions. Then, can we talk 
about physics? 


O 29 Mar 97 at 2:21, Brad Shue wrote:

 When I get files for our
> faculty for posting on our WWW site that use macs and save the files
> to PC disks, we have some problems.
>
> 1) Lots of the files have "!" as the first character of the filename
> even though they were not saved that way.  This also screws up the
> filename if the full 8 characters.ext are used.  The "!" rolls the
> last character of the name off in to the bit bucket and really
> screws things up.  Why is this?

That's the way the file names are truncated, which is different from
the way Win95 truncates file names. If you can get your Mac and
Win95/NT users to use 7+3 file  (not 8+3) names from the start, then
all  will be well. (That is,  I agree, a burden.) Or, transfer files
via a path other than floppy. For example, if you have macs and PCs
on a Novell network then the long file names will be visible to all.

 
> 2) What is this "resource" directory it sets up on the disk?  It
> doesn't take up much space, it's just a pain to remove.
Mac files have a second place to store information, called a resource 
fork, in addition to the data fork. The resource fork carries extra 
info that only the MacOS can use, and it is placed on the PC disk in 
case the file is ever opened on a Mac. 
 

--
John E. Gastineau                (304) 296-1966
900 B Ridgeway Ave.              gastineau@badgerden.com
Morgantown, WV 26505
www.badgerden.com/~gastineau