info-mac@uw-beaver (12/13/84)
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) I've noticed that when Macwrite 3.17 reads in an old format document and writes it out in its new format, the new file is about 20% smaller than the old one. Also, using FEDIT you can see that documents in the new format have no recognizable ascii characters in them at all. So I guess the new Macwrite is using Huffman encoding to store its documents in a compact form. This makes it impossible, by the way, to recover parts of a file by looking at individual blocks of a badly damaged disk, which is what I was trying to do with FEDIT. Let me repeat the warnings about this test version of Macwrite, 3.17. I do know one person who's had some success with it, but there are some horror stories too. For example, you will ruin 3.17 documents if you try to open them with the old Macrite. Printing in high quality is unbelievably slow in 3.17. There are other problems too, I hear. Eric Mazur (mazur@harvard) tells me he's found enough serious bugs to conclude that 3.17 is "trash" and should be thrown away. So if you still want to use it after hearing this, make lots of backups.