Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!vuwcomp!rata.vuw.ac.nz!alex
From: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacWrite II vs. Word 4.0
Message-ID: <14788@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Date: 10 May 89 19:42:06 GMT
References: <13358@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <10071@claris.com>
Sender: news@comp.vuw.ac.nz
Reply-To: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley)
Organization: Computing Serv. Ctr, Victoria Uni., Wellington, New Zealand
Lines: 29

And now for those of us who spend a lot of time recovering crashed hard
disks, smashed floppies and corrupted files...

Does MacWrite II still use the wonderful MacWrite file compression scheme?
This scheme, which saves a few bytes, makes the process of recovering a
corrupted or damaged document a lot harder. 

With MS-WORD you can always change the file to be a text file and then
edit out the formatting info, with MW, you run one of the decoding
programs over the file (or if you're unlucky the entire disk) and then
present a mess to the semi-hysterical person, suggesting that they remove
everything from the file that doesn't look like their text. 

I would consider it a great boon, if this compression scheme was dropped,
people don't care about space usage. They want files that are robust and
can be recovered. I once started to write a WP that had tagging
information on every block, so that you could put it back together if any
block disappeared and that clearly marked formating information, so you
could do simple search and replaces to get rid of it if necessary.
Unfortunately I didn't get very far with it (too much time spent
recovering disks and files).

So Claris, have you dropped the compression scheme? And have you any plans
to make your files more robust and easy to recover?

Alex Heatley                                Computing Services Centre
Domain: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz                 Victoria University of Wellington
Path: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!rata!alex           P.O Box 600, New Zealand.
Trolls can often be found under bridges ... or in Computing Departments.