Re: [NTLK] Mucho bizarro

From: Dan (dan_at_dbdigitalweb.com)
Date: Fri Aug 20 2004 - 22:43:25 PDT


Martin Howard wrote:
> On Aug 20, 2004, at 15:37, Dan wrote:
>
>
>>Yes I can tell you what the problem is. You are using RTF with a newer
>>version of Microsoft Word that is not 100% compatible with Bookmaker
>>(which is several years older not to mention Word likes to put in extra
>>junk in all files).
>
>
> But how does that explain the fact that when I select the text in Word,
> do "copy", go to TextEdit (which is every bit as modern as Word is and
> both are running on OS X) and do "paste", it turns out as
> garbage/wingdings? What is even more odd is that if I then select the
> newly pasted text in TextEdit and try to change the font to something
> else, it will not change. I still get those funky little symbols.
>
> Note, however, that it is only the text that is set in Monaco in the
> Word document that this happens to. The other text, set in Geneva and
> in New York, works just fine and shows up in TextEdit just the way
> you'd expect it to.
>
> It seems to me that something else is going on here... unless,
> somehow, Word's implementation of RTF is massively broken... or that
> it's parsing of Word 5.1 files is broken. Which, while being unlikely,
> is not something that I'd put past Micro$oft...

Hmm, well I can say that probably Monaco is throwing things for a curve.
  But I would bet it is a combination of Word and Monaco. It shouldn't
make a difference unless Word is doing something weird. Which trust me,
it does many times. If you do some research on Word and security you
will find that it is no longer used in areas that are serious about
security. The reason why is called "meta data". This is data that is
placed in the document as "filler" and can contain compromising data.
For instance Word documents have been known to contain passwords, names
of people that worked on it and other compromising data that was not
suppose to be in the file. And on the surface it was not there, you had
to do some digging to find it. Microsoft has since released a tool that
will delete "meta data" but since it does create this data in the first
place, who knows what else it does.

Granted this may or may not be the problem, but it does make you wonder.

Also, I would like to point out that New York and Geneva are the only
two fonts that Bookmaker supports natively. Anything else it will
revert to the Espy (system) font. The reason for the glitches you are
getting, I suspect the root cause is Microsoft Word.

Now you can edit the bookmaker output file (.f) to change the fonts.
But I have not experimented with it much yet though I am certain it is
possible (I just have not tested/documented). That is next on my agenda
after I fix the few remaining bugs in multi-format Newton Books.

-Dan

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