Hi George, Nick and James, Thanks for your responses. They made me curious enough to try an experiment so I sent three attachments to my PC friend (who happens to be John McGhie, another MS MVP). All three were screen shots. The first one I dragged into my message where the .mac extension was appended (as in the original message that started this whole thing). The second I gave the .pict extension and the third .jpg.
Here's what John sent back and when you're done reading it, I'd still be interested in an answer to my original question which remains unanswered: "Why did Entourage not append a *Windows* extension to the PICT file" (or at the very least a .pict extension which apparently is completely intelligible to a Windows machine)? Beth ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From John McGhie: Picture 1.mac is a PICT, the file extension is assigned to MacPaint on the PC. Quick Time tries to open it, gets confused, hands it off to Apple Picture Viewer, which attempts to open it, finds the content is not MacPaint, and fails on an error message saying the file is corrupted. Picture 2.pict is a PICT, it says it's a PICT, and Apple QuickTime Picture Viewer opens it straight up. Picture 3.jpg is a PICT, it says it's a JPEG, and thus confuses the hell out of Windows. Windows Picture and Fax Viewer attempts to open it and fails, saying there is no Preview available (in other words, it has recognised the PICT but been unable to find the bitmap it is expecting within the PICT). Corel PhotoPAINT won't "open" it, but it "imports" it twice, once for the bitmap and once for the vector information. CorelDRAW, which will open anything this side of a bank vault, discovers it's a PICT and opens it straight up. The moral of this story is: 1) PCs do not have a .mac file type or extension registered unless they have Apple QuickTime installed (most of them do...). A knowledgeable PC user can instantly create one, and if he could guarantee that a .mac was always a PICT, he would. If the PC has Apple QuickTime installed, the extension is assigned to MacPaint. While MacPaint probably can create a PICT, QuickTime is "expecting" a bitmap (probably a TIFF). If the recipient is using Windows XP, and he doesn't have QuickTime installed (very rare) Windows will offer to go and get the QuickTime viewer when it sees the .mac extension. 2) If it is a PICT and the file extension says it's a PICT, a PC will find a way to handle it every time without any interesting side-effects. 3) If it is a PICT and you rename it as a JPEG, most computers have no chance: you are making the game too hard! When a PC gets confused, it will go first for the internal file type. If the application handling that file type can't handle the file, it will give it back and Windows will hand it off to the application indicated by the extension. If the content of the file is not what the extension says it is, the system has run out of ideas: you get an error. 4) If you want to send PICTs to people, ensure that they leave you labelled with the .pict extension. If you send to a Mac, it will work because all Macs have .pict handlers installed. If you send to a PC, it will almost always work too, because almost all PCs have QuickTime installed. If the PC concerned does not have QuickTime installed, Windows will automatically offer to go and get the QuickTime Viewer. On Unix (Mac OS X) and PCs (Windows) it is often fatal to lie about your extension. The extension is supposed to indicate "the data type of this file's contents" and if it is not true, usually neither system can recover from the error. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On 6/3/03 5:17 PM, "Beth Rosengard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OS 9.1, Entourage 2001 > > I sent a PICT file to a PC user as an attachment. I had the option to append > Windows extensions checked. The extension Entourage appended was .mac and the > attachment was unreadable by the recipient until he changed the extension to > .pict. The encoding was AppleDouble. > > Why did Entourage not append a *Windows* extension to the PICT file? -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
