More on attachments...

From
Date
Folks,

I'm on a couple of other lists, and occasionally I get attachments on these
too. One of the better ways seems to provide the file as "HTML", the format
used by world-wide web browsers. Besides being platform independent, it
forces the file to format properly, whatever program is reading it. So bold
titles are always bold, italics are italics, etc.

Creating basic text html files is extremely easy. And even if you can't be
bothered, some programs will do it for you. For example the excellent
swiss-army knife program ClarisWorks, which is available on Mac and Windows
platforms, will happily convert a word-processed file into HTML.

Also, compared with some documents (e.g., Word) HTML files are smaller and
thus quicker to download. They are really no bigger than plain-text files,
and don't have lots of header, font, etc., information built in. That is
all added by the browser _afterwards_.

Open the file in Netscape or whatever, and then Save...and voila! A plain
text file for your own favourite word processor.

> > so compressed files can be converted to executables self extracting
>files also.

Self-extracting archives from one platform may not work on another. Until
everyone uses Macs, we have to take into account people using more
primitive technology!

Hope this helps,

Neale.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

>From  Neale Monks' Macintosh PowerBook, at...

Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, SW7 5BD
Internet: N.Monks@nhm.ac.uk, Telephone: 0171-938-9007
Telephone (international): 0044 171 938 9345

--------------------------------------------------------------------