From: Bill Gosper <rwmgosper@yahoo.com>
Would they be willing guinea pigs for my latest disk puzzle? (http://gosper.org/Arnold.rtf .)
You might think that rtf was a standard format, but apparently, you can include pictures in there that not all rtf, er, renderers can render. Rtf is interesting because inside it's all text, and Arnold.rtf begins... {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033 {\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}} {\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.15.1507;} i.e. Created by Microsoft Edit \viewkind4\uc1\pard\qc\f0\fs36 Arnold Dozenegger \par \par \fs20{\object\objemb{\*\objclass Paint.Picture} I don't know if that's from the Paint program in Windows or just a format they use. Maybe if you made it a .bmp or .gif, more programs could display it. Don't know how to do that in your context. \objw8310\objh7800{\*\objdata 01050000 02000000 ... and megabytes and megabytes of hex digits. On my Mac, I can't see the picture with these: TextEdit (the Mac's default rtf editor) AppleWorks (the former Word substitute) but I can with NeoOffice (OpenOffice with a Mac (non-X) front end) I don't have Apple's "Pages" to try. By the way, zipping the file reduces it from 8.6MB to 220KB-- "39 times as small!" If you tell zip (winzip, pkzip) to use its oldest format, Macs have a better chance of decoding it. --Steve p.s. it's strange how a megabyte is large for email and tiny for disk space. A typical novel is about a megabyte. We are at the point where it's like mailing a book vs. keeping a book in a large library. (& a flash card or USB drive is like carrying a small library around in your pocket.)