Re: Cross Platform Files (was [WINMAC] AppleShare IP 5.x vs 6.x)
Graeme Costin(gcostin[at]ozemail.com.au)
Tue, 8 Dec 98 14:38:53 +1100
caerwyn <caerwyn@bigfoot.com> said:
>You may be alright at the moment if you use Office 98 on the Mac and
>Office 97 on the PC. According to Microsoft, they supposedly use the same
>file format on both platforms. However the reality is there will be
>niggling differences due to the way diacritical and currency characters
>are stored.
Yes, ASCII characters are seldom a problem but extended ASCII are
normally a problem because there are at least three different sets: IBM
extended (MS-DOS), Mac extended and Win extended. When saving as a
document for the other platform, software like Word attempts to convert
the extended ASCII character bytes in a file to produce the same
character shapes on the other platform; this is not completely possible
because there are some Win extended characters that are not in the Mac
extended set and vice versa.
Within the Summer Institute of Linguistics, some work is done using fonts
prepared for both Mac and Win which have the same code points (byte
values) on both platforms, and using RTF as the transfer medium between
platforms, because Saving As RTF does not attempt to make the character
transformations that Save As does. This means that non-English languages
which use many more than the 26 English alphabetic letters can be handled
on either platform with easy swapping of data between platforms.
Graeme
______________________________________________________
Graeme Costin, Costin Computing Services and
Summer Institute of Linguistics
Internet: costing@acm.org
Office: 27 Godfrey Road, Artarmon, NSW 2064, Australia
Phone: 61-2-9419-6194
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