Followup: Mass Conversion of DOS Text Files into a Windows-Compatible Format

[Chuck Hastings <cwh2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Free Framers,

This is a postscript to my previous email  ("Thanks
to All, for Good Advice."  9/5/2002) on some details
of the mechanics of the first step of my process,
for converting a large group of DOS text files all
at once into one big FrameMaker file.

By now, the trick of converting many files at once by
attaching them to an email message emailed to oneself,
and getting them all back inline in one big email message,
has been validated for Netscape 6.2 and for Outlook
Express by Alison Tartt, and for Netscape 4.79 by myself.

Defaults have to be set appropriately, or the trick doesn't
work — the files just come back still as attachments.
The defaults may be settable under  Edit > Preferences.
In some cases, they may only have been settable when the
browser and its email facility were originally installed.
Setting the defaults to always send HTML text, and not
plain text, causes the files to come back still as
attachments.

In Outlook Express, Alison says that the setting must
be changed from  `attachment'  to  `include-in-message.'

In Netscape 4.79, DOS text files with no postfix come
back just inline.  DOS text files with a .txt postfix come
back BOTH inline and as attachments!  Odd, but logical.

In Netscape 4.79, the files have to be selected in the
reverse order of how they're to come out;  i.e., in my
35-chapter novel, Chapter 35 is clicked on first, and
Chapter 1 is clicked on last.  Apparently that's no longer
true for Netscape 6.2  (a very different animal from
Netscape 4.79)  or for Outlook Express.

Special characters  (such as the é in San José)   may
get clobbered somewheres along the line, and need to
be regenerated once the file is safely in FrameMaker
format.  That glitch is not unique to this conversion
method.

Obviously, the appeal of this email trick is limited if
there aren't very many files.  But my novels have several
dozen chapters, and Alison's cookbooks have several
hundred recipes.  Under those circumstances, it can be a
major timesaver.


Chuck Hastings      cwh2@earthlink.net



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