🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3323C489.1316@m.u-tokyo.ac.jp>,
lamphier@m.u-tokyo.ac.jp wrote:

>What is the story with MS Word for Macintosh??? It used to be a decent
>word processing program, but version 6 is not only hopelessly
>complicated and slow but it appears to be incompatible with other
>versions of the same program! I have found that files written in MS Word
>ver. 5 can be opened with ver. 6, but not vice versa. Yet ver. 6 files
>cannot be saved back into the ver 5 format. This means that once you
>open a ver. 5 file with a ver. 6 program and do a little editing you are
>stuck with using ver. 6 -- you cannot go back to the ver. 5 program. 
>
>And now I find that MS Word-J ver. 6 (Japanese version) is incompatible
>with the standard MS Word ver. 6 ! ! ! !  A file created with MS-Word-J
>is not recognized by the English version, even if thje file is entirely
>in English, and it has to be converted back into text before it can be
>read.

It's not wierd, it's a feature. The only way I've found to reliably move
files between US and Japanese versions of Word is to save in one as .rtf
and then open in the other. Same thing E->J or J->E. But don't even thing
about opening a file with 2-byte characters in the English version.


>This is weird -- what are these guys thinking? ? ? (ya, I know...
>they're thinking "you should buy a PC and install Windows"). 

I would never tell you to do that. Friends using Win95 tell me they have
almost the same problem: They can sometimes open files from the other
version OK, but then have to be sure to save immediately or face certain
data loss.

This is what you should do: Avoid using Word. ClarisWorks, WordPerfect and
Nisus are all WorldScript-aware and trade files seamlessly between Japanese
and English versions. (Caveat: I have personal experience only with the
first two.)


>Is there a way of converting between MS-Word Ver. 5, MS-Word Ver. 6 and
>MS-Word-J Ver. 6 that I am missing?

See above.


>-Marc Lamphier
>University of Tokyo

Regards,
Tod McAvoy
mctod@gol.com
in Sendagi, BTW, just up the road from Todai