Subject: Re: msword doc bug
sterwill@abisource.com
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 02:17:40 CST
Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> It is a major bug. One of the complaints of my father is that he has to
> use file extensions. Come on, people! This is the year 2000! The Macintosh
> has had pure file name support since 1984. We've got an advanced kernel, a
> comfortable desktop environment, but most software still relies on the
> users to tell it the type based on the _file name_! AbiWord should use
> magic numbers to detremine file types. I did a patch for midnight
> commander recently implementing this, but I'm not sure I'd be able to do
> it for AbiWord. It's worth a try :).
I completely agree with everything you say. I don't mean to pick on
Paul here, who's done most of our Windows front-end development,
but time and again Windows just doesn't deal with things that aren't
"extensionised," perhaps for the same reasons that it _still_ really
stores file names in 8.3. We made decisions to work across the
lowest-common-denominator. Perhaps very soon we'll have a Mac port,
and I'm not sure what we'll do there. I believe it's common to preserve
the extension in the file names when dealing with Microsoft-tainted
data on the Macintosh (is this true?).
As for the bug... I think it's really just a simple thing to fix (the
wrong default file type is being used--AbiWord--instead of Auto Detect).
-- Shaw Terwilliger
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Jan 19 2000 - 02:17:41 CST