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This article appeared in the September 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
A few weeks ago an acquaintance was explaining his computer woes. He works at a small company with six computers--two of which are Macs and the rest various flavors of Windows. Even in this day of brainlessly easy networking, they're not wired. They use floppies and Zips to move files between the machines--good old sneakernet.
His boss wants to get rid of the Macs because she's gotten it into her head that there's some kind of insurmountable difference between Mac and PC disks and files. My advice was that a little common sense and a few inexpensive programs might change her mind. (Of course, getting rid of the PCs would be another option.)
While it is true that Macs and PCs use different disk formats, that's not a good reason to keep them from sharing files. Macs have had the ability to read, write and format PC removable media for many years. In fact, it's typical for people in a mixed environment to automatically format all their floppies and Zips as PC disks because the Mac doesn't care which format you use, while poor myopic Windows machines can't handle anything but Windows disks.
If your Windows machine does need to read Mac disks, there are several products out there to make it bilingual. MacOpener 2000 from DataViz and MacDrive 2000 from Mediafour are very similar programs allowing PCs running any recent version of Windows to handle Mac formatted floppies, CDs, Zips and pretty much any other kind of removable disk. The Windows machine treats the Mac disks and files just like it treats its own. You can even format Mac disks on your PC.
In most respects, the two programs are the same, although MacDrive does have a few extras that may tip the balance its way. The most visible of these is adding a small red apple icon to disks and folders so you know they're on Mac media. It also lets you see Mac file resource, creator and type information.
Of course, making the files accessible to the other machine is only half the battle. You have to be able to use the file once you get it there. One of the reasons for sticking with standard tools like Microsoft Office is that the file formats for the Mac and Windows versions are the same. As long as you can read the disk, you should be able to edit your letters in Word, your budgets in Excel and your masterpieces in Illustrator, no matter which machine you're using.
The problem is more difficult, if you're using programs that don't have exact equivalents on both sides of the fence.
The first complication is the different methods Macs and PCs use to figure out what program to open when you double-click a file.
On the Mac, when a file is double-clicked, the file name is ignored. Instead, there are two invisible four-character identifiers associated with a file: its type and creator codes. The type identifies the kind of data in the file, so a program can easily determine if it can make use of the data. Some of the common types are TEXT for text files and EPSF for encapsulated PostScript files. Since many different programs can produce TEXT and EPSF files, the creator code tells the Mac which program to use when the file is double-clicked. For example, a file with type TEXT and creator ttxt will be opened by SimpleText and a file with type TEXT and creator WPC2 will be opened by Word Perfect. Both SimpleText and Word Perfect could read the file, but only one of them is chosen automatically.
There are thousands of these type/creator combinations, and databases have sprung up on the Web to help us track down the obscure ones. One of the best that's been around for quite a while is TCDB 2000, which contains over 31,000 codes. Mercifully, Apple has spared us the hassle of working with the type and creator codes because the operating system usually does a pretty good job of managing them all by itself. It can also be argued that Apple has traditionally gone too far in hiding these codes from the user, leading to a lot of frustration when a file can't be opened and you don't know why.
When you double-click a file in Windows, on the other hand, the name is everything. Specifically, the last three characters of the name identify the type of the file. These last three characters are called the extension to the file name. For example, diary.DOC is a Microsoft Word file, because of the DOC extension.
This file identification method, an artifact of MS-DOS, dates at least all the way back to the direct ancestor of MS-DOS, called CP/M, which was common in the late 1970s. The file extension method has the advantage of being very simple and transparent because you can tell what flavor a file is just by knowing its name. On the other hand, it's not as flexible as the Mac type/creator method because, for example, you can only have one default program to open text files with the TXT extension. A real annoyance is that, since they only use three letters, all the good extensions were gobbled up long ago, leading to some really arcane ones from programmers who came to the party later than others. Who'd guess that birds.ogg is a sound file? (In fairness, we must admit there are some pretty weird type/creator codes on the Mac too; Ulmg/CDr4 leads to Adaptec Toast.) There are many extension databases on the Web. One such is ExtSearch.
So, suppose you've just poked a PC-formatted Zip disk into a drive on your Mac. None of the files will have type/creator codes. How do you get the right program to launch when you double-click a file? The answer is the File Exchange control panel. The PC Exchange window lets you map a PC extension to any file type/creator combination. The most common ones are set up by default. If you want to use these mappings to turn a PC file into a real Mac file with type/creator information, check out Renamer, shareware published by a company with the agnostic name Pseudogod Software Products.
Both MacDrive 2000 and MacOpener teach your Windows machine to do the same thing in reverse. But, if you want to make sure your Mac files will have the correct PC file names before they get to the PC, check out Name2Win, a free utility that will rename a whole folder full of Mac files for use on a PC.
When trading files between platforms, there inevitably comes a time when one side or the other has a program for which there's no easy equivalent. There are several strategies for dealing with this.
The easiest is to look at alternative formats in which the creator program might be able to store its data. For example, many word processing programs can store files in rich text format (RTF). This is a document format invented by Microsoft that's become sort of the Esperanto of word processors. RTF files usually lose some of the fancier formatting of the original document, but the essential features are still there. Similar formats, such as SYLK and DIF, exist for spreadsheets.
The best way to go for serious users is to look at the file translation programs from DataViz.
On the Mac side, MacLink Plus Deluxe can translate dozens of different word processing, spreadsheet, graphic and database formats between different programs, including all the common ones and even a few that have gone extinct. Once installed and configured, it's nearly automatic. Apple used to bundle an extremely useful stripped-down version of MacLink with the Mac operating system. MacLink Plus is far better, and is a must-have utility for many people.
On the Windows side, their Conversions Plus program does the same thing, and it's even bundled with MacOpener 2000, so the Windows user won't have any trouble reading those pesky Mac disks.
Neither MacLink Plus nor Conversions Plus do perfect translations all the time, and it's unreasonable to expect them to. As a case in point, all word processors have somewhat different feature sets, and there are usually a few formatting tricks unique to a particular program. These options probably can't be translated perfectly by even the most powerful translation software. But, within these limitations, they do an excellent job, even with tables and graphics.
Andy Arnold, a financial advisor at UBS|PaineWebber will discuss online financial resources at the September 25 LCS meeting.
The Louisville Computer Society meets 7:00Ð9:00 P.M. on the fourth Tuesday of each month at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail LCS@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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