On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 09:14, Peter Hinchliffe wrote: > On 31/10/2004, at 10:54 AM, Peter Sealy wrote: > > > This request is the opposite to the more common one of how to open > > received mail attachments. > > > > I need to send an attachment to an email so it can be opened and read > > by PC-using recipients. The attachment will be a kind of an > > information sheet and ideally will have more than one font size and > > bold typing as well as regular. > > Is there any way I can set up the format using TextEdit [or Tex-Edit > > Plus] so the PC-ers can read it? I do not have Word of any description > > or any other word-processing app? > > TextEdit in Panther can save (and open) in Word format. For what you > need, it will serve very well. If you don't have Panther, TextEDit can > still save as RTF which pretty much any modern word processor can read. > RTF preserves text and paragraph formatting.
Sending documents in Word format isn't really the best manners unless you _know_ the PC user has Word. It might not be too bad an idea to provide an RTF, or send Word with a PDF copy as well. > You can also use the "Save as PDF option" from the Print dialog, but > there's no guarantee that the recipient will have Acrobat Reader > installed. This is not uncommon with Windows machines. On the other hand, Acrobat Reader is a free download. Word most definitely is not - and the free Word Viewer is getting decidedly long in the tooth. > > If the answer is no, then if I just write a standard letter format > > using TextEdit and add .doc at the end of the title of the document > > does that ensure that at least PC-users can open it and with the > > original paragraph set out and formatting in place. > > No. The PC will just try to open it as a Word file and fail. Not only > that, the file will actually have a Word icon and confuse the heck out > of the recipient into the bargain. I actually get messages like this (generally from mac users, perhaps because its harder to change file extensions under Windows) a lot at work, so it's an important thing to understand. Changing the file extension does not change anything about the data, it just changes what the PC will _expect_ the file to contain. It'll open it in a different program which won't understand the file, and the recipient will usually tell you that your "document was corrupt" or some-such. I generally get the users to save such files in a network-accessible directory and use the `file' utility found on most Linux and UNIX systems (probably OS/X too) to identify what the real file type is, then convert it to something our users can work with. The single most frequent case is people renaming MS Word documents to '.pdf' and thinking it's made a PDF. It is beyond me why they don't attempt to open their "PDF" to make sure it worked before sending it to us... -- Craig Ringer
