[779] in Release_7.7_team
BinHex conversion utilities.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Nov 1 20:18:18 1996
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 20:18:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
I've been trying to make it easier for folks in E19 who manage and do
finance on Macs to communicate with people who do development on Unix
boxen.
Applixware will read in Microsoft Word 5.1 documents created on a Mac,
PROVIDED it is ONLY the data fork. If you give it the combined file, it
kills Applixware. (YES I have logged the bug with Applix.)
The hexbin program in outland has a -d option to create only a data fork.
But nobody can find the sources for hexbin, and even the French don't
seem to have a decent distribution of it.
[An Andrew ToolKit view (A long tired flame about not finding anything
useful on AltaVista, and grovelage over archie.) was included here, but
could not be displayed.] <inside joke for ATK cognoscienti>
I called the SIPB office and was referred to the program mcvert.
UNfortunately, mcvert absolutely refuses to separate out the components
into data, info, and rsrc fork files.
I went out onto the net again and found a newer version of mcvert which
ALSO didn't do the trick.
I did find a program that DID help: xbin. It does the right thing by
default, and its .shar archive is <34k.
I would like to improve our Mac/Unix interoperability.
I would like to do it by deploying standard, supported format conversion
utilities.
Any suggestions about what we do?
1. Put xbin into /usr/athena/bin?
2. Modify mcvert?
3. Find the source of hexbin and start officially supporting it?
I would like for everybody with Unix stations at MIT to be able to
convert BinHex documents without going on safari.
-wdc
