On 12 Apr 01 at 5:25, owner-arachne-digest@arachne wrote:
>Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 18:15:09 -0500
>From: Clarence Verge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: Readable format
>
>I have no idea if it was "Word" for DOS or something else - all I know
>is that it was version 6. something and the file was written in 1997.
Last version Word for DOS 6.0 was launched in 1993. When Word 5.0 for
DOS (1990) went mad at the beginning of Y2K MS made available a
free downloadable version of Word 5.5. The Windows versions started
in the at the beginning of the 1990s with a new numbering Word 1, 2,
3 etc. File format was reorganized.
>Cutting off the head and tail sounds good.
>How are these parts delineated ?
I am not an expert, but according to my experience the old DOS-
MSWord files have this format:
First three bytes (DEC) are 49, 190, 0. The header has a length of
128 bytes. The address of the end of pure text section can be found
at bytes 15 to 18. What comes after this address is tail. It
contains valuable contents information (use it eg. for title-tag in
HTML!), and I have no idea what else.
>> 4. How to open more complex files?
>>
>> If you dispose of 13 MB free HD capacity and a Windows machine you
>> might consider to install the Czech freeware "Office" from Soft602.
>This sounds good, but my understanding of your first line is not complete.
>Do I NEED Windows to run this Soft602 or can it be run in DOS ?
Yes it is a Windows program. But ist is probably one of the best non-
MS solutions under Windows.
>> http://www.ice.ru/~vitus/catdoc/index.html
>> catdoc and xls2csv - MS-Office format readers
>Ok, I downloaded and tried the above on the file in question, and it
>produced much more output than View170a - at least it did output the
>entire document - but the pages were in the wrong order.
>
>It's not as simple as saying just re-arange the order, because it starts
>in the middle of a page and goes to some random spot, and then the start
>of the document appears and so on....
>
>I don't know which is stupider: a document format that saves all your
>editing attempts as part of the document, or someone that would use it. :((
This is probably the result of the Auto-save function in MS-Word for
Wiondows. It is said to produce files that are very different from
those which have been normally saved to hard disk. Texts I do not
even save to disk do not seem to be too important. Why send them to
other people?
But even if I am right there will always be interesting text of high
quality which turns out to be unreadable for DOS useres because they
contain pictures and tables. What can I do with these? I have to
convince the author:
1. "Dear... I just want to read your texts and figures, no pictures.
So please save bandwidth and send me pure text. Everything else is
unnecessary. Go back to your bloated program and click on SAVE AS.
And when the computer asks you 'Do you really want to lose all
formatting information?' press ENTER." - I am afraid this will not
convince everybody.
1.a. Religious variant: "The Scripture (Ex 20,4) gives you a clear
advice how thou shalt use your computer." - There is a deep
truth in this argument, but knowing a lot of clever theologians, I
have some doubt whether it will always work.
2. "Your text is great. It really deserves a good layout and it
should be made available as soon as possible to a large audience.
Did you consider to upload it to World Wide Web? You know, your very
sophisticated software makes it very easy, so actually anybody can
do it: Just click on SAVE AS. Don't care about this HTML. It just
means the universal standard of the WWW created by MS and others.
Well, in some cases there might be a minor problem with pictures.
Because real professionals as you and I use to handle them
differently. So do not insert them to your document, but save them
separately. Another great program on your computer 'FrontPageExpress
6800' puts the pictures at the right place." - This should convince
everybody.
2.b. A religious variant of this seems to be kind of
complicated (Ex 20,16 ) Can anybody help me?
Regards
Christof Lange
_______________________________________________
Christof Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
phone: (+420-2) 22 78 18 00 / 22 78 20 02, telefax: 22 78 18 01
http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
