Slashdot Mirror
Panther's TextEdit to Open MS Word Files
2muchcoffeeman writes "Further signs that Jobs and Gates probably won't be vacationing together anytime soon: New Damage has what looks to be screenshot proof of Panther's TextEdit.app opening a Microsoft Word .DOC file. Panther beta users who have tried this report at MacSlash that it works, to a point. So what's next? Is Apple now going to bring back the late, great MacWrite Pro?"
Because when you use shift-cmd-3 (full-screen) or shift-cmd-4 (area) to take a screengrab, Mac OS X uses PDF for its output.
PDF is the default screen capture format in Mac OS X (10.2), and I assume in Panther as well.
Here's a link to a freeware app that already enables Cocoa applications to do a similar thing, but with text only: AntiWord Service. It works on Mac OS X 10.1.5 and higher.
And that's the whole reason the format changes, to encourage upgrades and break third party support. They want everyone to buy it and buy a new version every 2 years.
Myself, I'll stick with AppleWorks and its imperfect importing and exporting capabilities. I just need it to export my resume to Word format from time to time for the HR departments that only want Word formatted documents, and the one or two outside Word documents I have to open per year.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
A good slashdotter would peek in the file and notice this:
Producer: Mac OS X 10.3 Quartz PDFContext
It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?
-Kvorg
Interesting. I guess opening a PDF seems more 'heavy weight' than opening a PNG. Learn something new everyday....
If anyone is interested, a PNG file of the image in the PDF is 2KB larger than the PDF itself.
IE will continue to evolve on Mac, but it will be only for inclusion in MSN. Standalone versions for both Mac and Windows are going away.
:)
Like surfing the internet is something everyone needs to do with their computer, enough to make it part of the OS! What are these guys thinking?
--- If you hadn't stayed to read this
Word/Excel formats didn't change in Office XP.
Powerpoint formats haven't changed since Office 97
...because it's true.
The Quartz Extreme Rendering Engine original Display Postscript for Openstep now takes advantage of Postscript Primitives in PDF, plus direct hardware rendering to the GPU via other custom APIs to produce an advanced UI that renders line by line in real-time, smoothly with anti-aliasing built-in, plus never a loss of window viewing when one is moving them around the desktop.
I had no idead EPS could manage and update Postscript coordinate points from Global to Local, on the fly?
Safari was just an excuse. MSFT was planning on discontinuing IE for the mac for a long time now and Apple knew it. MSFT will use a backwards version of the tactic they used to oust netscape from the browser market. They will use their browser monopoly and IE features integrated into Longhorn OS to marginalise the OS market. You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users. That way they attack Apple and any other OS rivals simultaneously. Damn those MSFT busienss strategists are smart...
Why? Because it makes sense.
It is also nice to be able to create documents and share them with those less fortunate (Windows people). There is no spreadsheet program that is near what Excel does.
Indeed. Excel vX for Mac is superior in some ways to the Windows version. Where I work at present I do not have access to any serious database and statistical analysis software, so I'm stuck using Excel to manage a list. The Mac version makes it is easy to use Excel like Access, since it includes a feature called "list manager" which allows you to filter data sets with ease. The Windows version lacks this feature completely...
Of course Panther has built-in X11, but we don't know yet whether it will be any prettier than the X11 beta. My fingers are crossed.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Dude, Omnigraffle 3.0.1 does almost everything Visio does and is much simpler to use. Check it out!
When I read the parent, it occurred to me that this is much more than TextEdit being able to read Word files.
/Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit
TextEdit is a very simple program. Apple even supply the full source for it in the developer tools under
All the real work is done by standard Cocoa classes NSTextView and NSTextStorage. If TextEdit understands Word files, it means that they have added the support to these standard classes. That means that *ALL* cocoa applications will inherit this functionality.
Having worked with a large number of cross-platform environments, I can assure you that the "problems" that occur with formatting also occur between Windows computers running various versions of Office. Or even the same version of Office. I once spent 20 minutes trying to explain to someone that there was nothing _I_ could do to make her resume look the same on my computer as it did on hers, since we both had Windows 2000, and we both had Office 2000, and the resume was an Office 2000 document, and used the standard Windows-installed fonts.
People who use Word day-to-day typically are quickly stripped of any expectation of consistency of presentation across computers...
So such a problem won't be a big deal between platforms, where there's at least a buyable explanation.
--plambert
You can actually define your own screen capture key-combos in Panther yourself (ain't that nice ;-)
But here are the defaults:
COMMAND + SHIFT + 3
capture whole screen and save on desktop
COMMAND + CONTROL + SHIFT + 3
capture whole screen and save in clipboard
COMMAND + SHIFT + 4
capture selection and save on desktop
COMMAND + SHIFT + 4 (+ CONTROL when releasing mouse)
capture selection and save in clipboard
COMMAND + SHIFT + 4 + SPACE
capture the window you click on and save on desktop
If you hold CONTROL while clicking it'll save the image in the clipboard.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I doubt very much that that would happen. After all, Apple already has the developers. Why would they need the (non portable) program as well?
One of Apple's best kept secrets is that there is a version of AppleWorks for Windows. It is only available to education customers however. You get both the Mac and Windows versions on one CD for $39!
From Apple's site:
System Requirements
AppleWorks 6.2 for Mac OS X
An iMac, iBook, Power Mac G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube, PowerBook G3, or PowerBook G4
128MB of physical RAM
Mac OS X, v10.0 or later
A CD-ROM drive (for installation)
An Internet connection*
QuickTime 5 or higher (included on CD)
To use Mac OS X, you will need a computer with at least 128MB of physical RAM.
AppleWorks 6.2 for Mac OS 8/9
An Apple computer with a PowerPC processor
24MB of physical RAM with virtual memory set to at least 25MB
Mac OS 8.1 or later
A CD-ROM drive (for installation)
An Internet connection*
QuickTime 4.1.2 or higher (QuickTime 5 included on CD)
AppleWorks 6.2 for Windows
A PC with a Pentium processor
32MB of physical RAM
Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000 and XP
A CD-ROM (for installation)
An Internet connection*
QuickTime 4.1.2 or higher (QuickTime 5 included on CD)
Internet Explorer 5 (included on CD)
Quartz is not "Display PDF". Don't know where you saw or why you decided to make up that retarded name. Quartz uses the Generic PDF format as an engine to Quartz. This was chosen over Display Postscript for more reasons than simply licensing costs. Apple had considered using the full PDF format, but the costs were higher--generic PDF is free to implement. They (Apple) did not invent generic PDF, Adobe did.
I went one better for you. I compiled and ran the version of TextEdit supplied as example code with XCode on Panther. It was able to open a .doc file. I can confirm that it is using NSTextView and NSTextStorage (not custom subclasses) to do this. So it looks like all Cocoa apps using text views will be able to provide basic .doc file handling for free. Very nice :)