Super TWiT

Q: Appleworks 6.28 & Textedit??

So I was wanting to use my "vintage" iBook G3, running Mac OS 9.2, to do some simple word processing in conjunction with my Mac Mini running Yosemite. The G3 has Appleworks 6.28, and support for rtf.  So while upsettingly the new Pages won't work with rtf, I figured I could use TextEdit. But the G3 always shows weird characters when importing an rtf from the mini, particularly for quotation marks, apostrophes, and line returns.  Textedit can read a document from the G3 just fine, but if I save to it, the G3 becomes confused. Examining the formatting of the rtf files, I noticed that rtf files from Textedit use a /ansi control word, which specifies it use the ansi character set, while the G3 uses the /mac control word. So I tried setting Textedit to use MacOs Roman character encoding, however even plain text files do not display correctly....There must be someway to able to edit a document between the two machines....

300 mhz iBook G3 Clamshell, Mac OS 9.2.x

Posted on Jan 30, 2015 4:13 AM

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Q: Appleworks 6.28 & Textedit??

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  • by Tom Gewecke,

    Tom Gewecke Tom Gewecke Jan 30, 2015 7:06 AM in response to Super TWiT
    Level 9 (79,055 points)
    Jan 30, 2015 7:06 AM in response to Super TWiT

    Super TWiT wrote:

     

    So I tried setting Textedit to use MacOs Roman character encoding, however even plain text files do not display correctly....

     

    So you had a TextEdit doc which displayed correctly, you did Format > Make Plain Text, and then you saved using Western Mac OS Roman encoding, and Apple Works did not display it correctly?

     

    You can avoid most encoding differences if you turn off "smart" quotes/punctuation in both apps.  That is the area (in addition to accented characters) where macroman and ansi tend to differ.

     

    I don't have Appleworks any more -- can it save to .doc Word format in addition to .rtf?