Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!claris!jazzman
From: jazzman@claris.com (Sydney R. Polk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacWrite II vs. Word 4.0
Message-ID: <10139@claris.com>
Date: 12 May 89 22:43:18 GMT
References: <14788@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Organization: Claris Corporation, Santa Clara CA
Lines: 39

From article <14788@comp.vuw.ac.nz>, by alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley):
> 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.
I am not on the MacWrite II team, but I don know that the compression
scheme was dropped.


-- 
Syd Polk           | Wherever you go, there you are.
jazzman@claris.com | Let the music be your light.
GO 'STROS!         | These opinions are mine.  Any resemblence to other
GO RICE!           |  opinions, real or fictitious, is purely coincidence.