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["Ernest May" ermay@xxxxxxxx]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xywrite@xxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-xywrite@xxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of J. R. Fox
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 3:47 PM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Off-Topic -- Apparently intractable problem with MSWord


"Yo Intl. YK" wrote:

> At 20:49 Uhr -0800 13.12.2001, J. R. Fox wrote:
> > What I had to do for those was to go in with a File Manager that can
VIEW
> inside
> >*any* file and extract the plain text.
>
> Actually, you can use XYwrite for that. Why resort to other text editors
> when we already have the best there is. Of course, you have to swith to
> expanded view -- one never knows how many single guillemots are lurking
> inside a Wurgh file.

I guess it depends on what sort of a "lockout" we are talking about. Anyone
remember a word-proc. clone of MultiMate, called Leading Edge ? It's big
selling point was ease of learning / ease of use -- at least, compared to
whatever else was on the market at that time. They used a weird,
proprietary
file format, that internally made heavy use of Hex 1A -- a.ka., the EOF or
End
File Marker. This made their created documents "impervious to DOS": you
could
not load such files into any standard DOS program, only the LE-WP, which of
course knew how to handle them. If one of their files got corrupted, and
LEWP
could not open it, you were S. O. L.

However, a good file manager (*) can pull up a Hex / Ascii display of a
file's contents, whether it's text, an .EXE, or whatever, and won't be
stopped
by any errant characters like this. Or even if the file is damaged, it's
file
space cross-allocated, etc. I know almost nothing about the WORD file
formats
and what they may use, but there are situations where you might find a
spurious EOF character in a file, not there intentionally for some type of
formatting, and the file actually is supposed to continue beyond that point.
Can XY handle this, even in expanded mode ? I'd be quite surprised to learn
it could.

( * I use ZTree Bold for OS/2 and ZTree-Win for Win-32, both clones of the
old
XTree Gold, but there are many others having the same capability.) And you
can extract any sections you like, re-assembling a new file from said pieces
elsewhere.

Jordan