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Translating files can be problematic



Author: Fred Cranston
Date: June , 1988
Keywords: Fred's Follies mouse droppings book error errors
Text: by Fred Cranston Do you sometimes dislike dialogue boxes telling you to do something you don't want to do? Perhaps you have decided not to insert a named disk as requested or you wish to break a string of disk interchanges. Type COMMAND/. (Note the slash and the period.) This will sometimes clear your screen. For this hint, thank Philip C. Russell, 1420 SW Crest Circle, Waldport, OR 97394, publisher of The Mouse Droppings Book of Macintosh Hints and its sequel TMD Second Book. Both of these books have a bunch of interesting hints. I recommend them to you. WriteNow has a weird bug. I wished to transfer a WriteNow document to MacWrite. The proper procedure is to first use the WriteNow Translator to make a Text copy of the document; then ''blacken'' both the Text copy and MacWrite. Now double click on the document. It should open as a MacWrite document. When I did everything correctly I received the message: PLEASE OPEN/PRINT ONLY DOCUMENTS OF THE SAME KIND. [OK] I received the same message when I tried to convert to WordPerfect. Finally after days of Follying around, I called T/Maker (publishers of WriteNow) and was told ''Oh, our Translator is not compatible with the new System. However we are working on a new edition of WriteNow which should be out by June which will be compatible.'' Using AutoSave with WriteNow can also cause excessive memory-use problems. My suggestion is to call the publisher as soon as you see an obvious problem which you can't seem to solve. It will save hours of time and most of them are fun to talk to anyway, especially the good people at T/Maker. Follies has been away for a few months as we have moved into a new home. We now have an ''office'' with a special area for the Mac+. In moving the Mac +, I committed a great folly which caused me a lot of trouble after our move, but I did learn a lesson from it. Here is the problem. I inserted a disk into the drive on my Mac+, played around for a while and wanted to eject it by using Command E. It didn't eject. I tried Command Shift 1. No ejection. (Even though I only have one drive, I tried Command Shift 2. Obviously this won't work, but a superstitious physicist will try anything.) I dragged the disk Icon to Trash and it ejected as usual, but now I couldn't copy a file onto it from another disk because its Icon had disappeared. The question is: What Folly did I commit so that I could not eject my disk in the above manner? If you can guess my folly, write it down. At the June meeting, I will draw one from the batch of correct answers (if any) and donate a disk with a bunch of Shareware on it to the winner.

Copyright © june , 1988 by Fred Cranston


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