Open word files in textedit in Panther..

[astray]

Came across this site which claims that Panthers TextEdit.app is able to open word documents, i do not have Panther so can anyone verify?

http://www.mikey-san.net/damage/index.html#panther_textedit

[Laslo Panaflex]

Yup, I tried it and it works, in fact in if you control click and select choose application, text edit is in the menu.

Peas.

[Laslo Panaflex]

Here is a pick of the menu:

[Laslo Panaflex]

ooops here it is really

[Jays]

not only that, you can also open Unicode doc like Hebrew and save as word doc!

this is absolutly great :-)

[robbieduncan]

Note that although it works great for text all advanced features of Word are not supported. You don't even get tables. What is more interesting is how this has been implemented. Instead of coding the Word stuff into TextEdit Apple have coded it into the Cocoa text handling system. What this means is that any Cocoa app that uses a text component gets the ablity to read/write Word files for free. I just love Cocoa!

[robbieduncan]

Here is the updated text format help page from TextEdit:



About rich text, plain text, and Word formats





TextEdit can create three different file types: Rich Text Format (RTF) files, plain text files, and Word Format files. Plain text files have the filename extension ".txt", RTF files are given the filename extension ".rtf", and Word files are given the extension ".doc". You can prevent the filename extension from being shown by selecting the "Hide extension" checkbox in the Save dialog.



Only RTF and Word files can include paragraph and font formatting. If you add graphics to an RTF file, its file extension is changed to ".rtfd." Most word processors can open RTF files.



Microsoft Word can open Word Format files. Not all Word file features (tables, for example) are supported in TextEdit.



Plain text files have preset tab stops that cannot be changed. Font styles and colors in plain text files are not saved when a document is closed and reopened. Nor can graphics or other embedded files be added to plain text documents.



To learn more about formatting TextEdit documents, click "Tell me more," below.

[Freg3000]

While this obviously is not a replacement for Word itself, it certainly is a nice tool to do a quick change in spelling or break up a long paragraph.

Cool Apple. :D

[FattyMembrane]

the latest appleworks update (6.2.7) can handle word files with embedded images (something that's been lacking since... forever). i'm assuming that this is due to a new dataviz component, but i really hope that apple works on incorporating this into the cocoa text engine. there are several shareware apps that have this capability (icWord for instance) and although i hate to see apple crush the small shareware companies, this is one of those features that really needs to be bundled with the os. by the way, devontechnologies just released their latest update to the antiword (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10522) service which allows you to open .doc files in any cocoa app.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by robbieduncan
Note that although it works great for text all advanced features of Word are not supported. You don't even get tables. What is more interesting is how this has been implemented. Instead of coding the Word stuff into TextEdit Apple have coded it into the Cocoa text handling system. What this means is that any Cocoa app that uses a text component gets the ablity to read/write Word files for free. I just love Cocoa!

Since Word uses Excel for tables, I'm not surprised. Agreed about Cocoa being great though :)