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From: folta@tove.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Something else you can't do on the Mac
Summary: not quite
Message-ID: <21572@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 1 Jan 90 22:39:21 GMT
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Reply-To: folta@tove.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
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Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
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"	I do this a lot.
"	Download a text file.  Now try to display it. On a PC, use type.
"On a Mac, you can't. 
"	
"	A downloaded text file has no associated application.  If you
"double click it, it gives you an error message.
"

I don't share your problem.  I use the comms program White Knight (formerly
Red Ryder), the most popular Mac comms program.  It (and maybe your comms
program, too) allows you to set the file type of a downloaded file.  After a
download, I simply double-click on the file to view it, or if it is small
enough (<32Kb) and I do not wish to use Word, I use a DA, such as NotePad+,
which is always instantly available.

[Complaints that many ASCII files are formatted with tabs and spaces
 for monospaced fonts, and hence look bad in the fonts that most
 Mac wordprocessors come up in...]

Well, I use MS Word, and it is not difficult to add a style to the default
style sheet to make the ASCII file nicely readable.  Do this once, and
forevermore you have only two steps to perform: One, select the whole document
with one click; and Two select the stupid ASCII format style you created.

In a sense, you are complaining that people create documents with the most
primitive formatting possible (ASCII with spaces and tabs), and that civilized
formatting (variable-width fonts, word-wrapping, etc.) is not totally
compatible with this. ;-).

But as I said in a previous posting, a graphical interface, obviously being a
different paradigm from a CLI, uses different steps to accomplish the same goal.
--


Wayne Folta          (folta@cs.umd.edu  128.8.128.8)