Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!ames!claris!krazy
From: krazy@claris.com (Jeff Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacWrite II vs. Word 4.0
Message-ID: <10170@claris.com>
Date: 18 May 89 09:42:03 GMT
References: <14788@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Organization: Claris Corporation, Santa Clara CA
Lines: 29

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. 

No, no, a thousand times no.  No compression scheme.

> 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. 

That's only true if you aren't using Word's fast save mechanism.  In that 
case, you can get your text back, but not in logical order.

MWII's file format is much the same way.  You can get the text out, but not
in the right order.  You should find the text in close-to-512-byte chunks,
though.  I may be able to provide more details by E-mail if you're interested.
No guarantees, though -- the file format may still be confidential.

-- 
Jeff Erickson           Claris Corporation  | "MacWrite II is both sexy and
408/987-7309          Applelink: Erickson4  |   effective."
krazy@claris.com         ames!claris!krazy  |                -- MacWeek 4/18
         "I'm a heppy, heppy ket!"          |