Subject: Attach-file problems

From: [email-masked] (Michael Smith)
Date: 21 May 1995 21:14:04 GMT

I am having difficulties in attaching a Word file to e-mail as follows: 
1) The document is saved in 'word' format, supposedly interchangeable 
between Mac and PC platforms.  Note: the doc has also been saved in 
various windows formats. 2) Document is sent "sz" from my Mac w/ Z-term 
to my Unix account. 3) File is attached to mail using control key in 
Pine. 4) Receiver is unable to translate file; i.e. the file will not 
open in Word.  

 I have not had this problem with files saved in text-only format, but I 
need to retain the formatting of the document including special 
characters.  Can anyone help with this?

-- 
***Michael [email-masked]***
PGP Key (and other stuff) available at:
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~mksmith/   or:
ftp.u.washington.edu public/mksmith/PGPKey.asc

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From: Don Sugarman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 07:50:08 -0400 (EDT)

> characters.  Can anyone help with this?
We've seen the problem here.  It was caused here by incompatible versions of 
Word.  You might try exporting the file to RTF or other compatible format 
for the transfer.

Good luck,
Don Sugarman
[email-masked]

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From: Andrew Le <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 07:16:59 -0700

Can you try saving the file in "RTF" format? That is a text file, which 
includes formatting characters in text also....

==================================================================
Andrew Le                             [email-masked] 
==================================================================

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From: "Paul O. Bartlett" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 10:51:30 -0400

On 21 May 1995, Michael Smith wrote:

> Date: 21 MAY 1995 21:14:04 GMT 
> From: Michael Smith <[email-masked]>
> Newgroups: comp.mail.pine
> Subject: Attach-file problems 
> 
> [etc.]

    When you send it from your Mac to your Unix account, are you sending 
it as an ASCII or as a binary file?  I suppose you send flat text-only 
files as ASCII.  However, word-processor files often (not always) contain 
what are 8th-bit-set control characters with respect to the usual 7-bit 
ASCII used in the US.  If you are sending your word-processor file up as 
an ASCII, the transmission process may be scrambling or discarding some 
of the imbedded control characters.  Try sending it from Mac to Unix as a 
binary file and see if that makes any difference (if you haven't already 
tried it).

Paul
--------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett         <[email-masked]>
P. O. Box 857     Vienna, VA 22183-0857     U.S.A.
Finger, keyserver, or email for PGP 2.6 public key
--------------------------------------------------

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From: Ian Russell Ollmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 22:06:50 -0700

Michael,

Pine and MIME are usually pretty good about not corrupting information. I
suspect that the problem may lie elsewhere. 

	The first thing to check is to make sure that you really saved the
mac file in a format that MS Word for Windows can read. One of the
numerous available formats for the mac is "MS Word for Windows 2.0". This
format is easily read by an IBM PC or clone and is what we use when
transferring files from one system to the other via disk. If you haven't
already done so, try saving your file in that format and then send it off
to your friend by the procedure you described below. 

If that doesn't work, try binhex-ing the Word-for-Windows document before
sending it off. That will convert the file from binary to ASCII, which
should preserve it from being corrupted by either sz or pine. If you do
this, you can even skip the sz phase entirely by pasting the contents of
the binhex'd file (as read by teachtext) directly into an outgoing mail
message from your mac. Your friend will have to find a way to un-binhex
the file on his/her PC. I am afraid that I really don't know what
applications are available for the PC to do this, but I suspect that there
are some. 

Note that many of the fonts on macs and PCs are copyrighted (or whatever)
and have no direct equivalent on the other system. Some of your special
characters may not have a direct equivalent on the PC. Since Microsoft
writes Word for both systems as well as Windows for the PC, MS Word 6.x
for the mac comes with some of the Windows fonts as part of the
application, but I seriously doubt that Word for Windows comes with mac
fonts as part of it. As a result, it may be much easier to send files from
PC to mac than the other way around. 

				Good Luck!

				  Ian