Friday, March 30, 200l

Yesterday we filed a simple story referring to a hapless posting at another site in which the author was pleased as punch to find he could (sort of) open Word files (.doc format) with Apple's OS X TextEdit application. Alas, it seemed such a simple thing to report...

As we have learned in this business, however, our readers are nothing if not sticklers for technical accuracy. Below you will find an edited email message from one who knows what he's talking about. In brief, no, of course not, Apple's TextEdit does not translate Word files. It merely shows you the content of such documents -- with the caveats noted below -- as do applications like BBEdit and one in particular that we'd like to point out: Tex-Edit, by Trans-Tex Software ($15 shareware, download version is fully functional). Take another look: That's T-e-x-Edit, as in TEXAS, naturally! Tom Bender's universally loved text editing application, which is now OS X native , is a joy to use and will always be a part of your editor's Mac toolbox. We want to be sure you can tell the difference between this app and the one bundled with OS X, since Tom has been a faithful Mac developer for quite some time and deserves your continued support.

Here are the facts about Apple's TextEdit software and MS Word files, as described by our reader:

"Whoever wrote that piece is enthusiastic but too fast on the trigger. This is nothing new. Tex-Edit Plus or any other text editor can do the same thing. The 'smattering of gibberish at the top and bottom' is the formatting and other information used by Word, as well as other private information. If you look toward the end of the file you can usually see all sorts of stuff about the computer used to generate the document; path names, printer names, fonts, etc.

There are two problems with blindly using this to read Word files. One, this doesn't translate the various high ASCII values that MS uses differently than Apple; things like quote marks and such. You can use an Applescript with Tex-Edit Plus to clean these up. You can get the script from the [AppleScripts for Tex-Edit Archives].

A more serious problem (although sometimes a benefit) is that this raw text also can include items that the author deleted. Somehow, Word leaves these text segments in the file but knows not to display them. I haven't explored this in depth but I have seen it several times as I usually open Word files first in Tex-Edit Plus and only resort to Word as a last resort. It sometimes leads you astray to see this text but sometimes it also is interesting to see what was being thought about then thought better of. I suppose that if someone were motivated enough and had time on their hands they could write a script that would only display the text that should be displayed.

Finally, I haven't triedTextEdit but I suspect from the evidence supplied that it will not display charts, graphs, images and such embedded in Word files."