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NeoOffice :: View topic - The Case of Disappearing .sxw Files
The Case of Disappearing .sxw Files
 
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JimWG
Keymaker


Joined: Jan 21, 2005
Posts: 75

PostPosted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 8:25 am    Post subject: The Case of Disappearing .sxw Files

Greetings All and God Bless Pat & Ed and their overtaxed underpaid NeoO crew!

Don't know whether this counts as a bug or "feature oversight."

A warning for some baffled users who discover that their saved OOo files have "disappeared" in folders where .rtfd files also reside with .sxw files.

Seems that OOo Save Menus see .rtfd files as folders instead of files like the Finder does, and one with fingers too careless can accidently open up and unwittingly save a .sxw file inside a .rtfd file and be none the wiser because the Finder doesn't reveal that .rtfd files are folders.

Or is just me??

James Greenidge

A kind of P.S....

AbiWord just happens to reside on my HD. After I upgraded to AW 2.2.5 and did the permissions thing and restarted, all my NeoOffice file icons turned into AbiWord icons and when clicked on boots up in Abi instead of NeoOffice. I have Onyx and dumped all the caches and permissioned and restarted but no dice. Only when I placed AbiWord in the trash and restarted did NeoOffice file icons return to normal. Can anyone explain this phenomena?

Thanks!

James Greenidge
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yoxi
Cipher


Joined: Sep 07, 2004
Posts: 1799
Location: Dawlish, Devon

PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:27 am    Post subject: Re: The Case of Disappearing .sxw Files

JimWG wrote:
AbiWord just happens to reside on my HD. After I upgraded to AW 2.2.5 and did the permissions thing and restarted, all my NeoOffice file icons turned into AbiWord icons and when clicked on boots up in Abi instead of NeoOffice. I have Onyx and dumped all the caches and permissioned and restarted but no dice. Only when I placed AbiWord in the trash and restarted did NeoOffice file icons return to normal. Can anyone explain this phenomena?

When you install a new app (or a new upgrade to an app, sometimes) it will update the file associations in OSX's app database that it thinks 'belong' to it, so that it becomes the default app to open them with. So I guess that with the AbiWord update installed last, any word (and wordperfect?) docs now had the AW icons on your system. When you trashed AW, the app database reverted to the last app with that claim, Neo/J.

A quick way to solve this is to reinstall AbiWord, and then do Get Info on a file of each kind that's had its icon changed (i.e. .doc, .wpd or whatever); in the Open With: section of Get Info, choose NeoOfficeJ in the dropdown list, then click on the Change All... button - this will associate all of that kind of doc with Neo/J from now on (or at least until the next time you update AbiWord...) You'll need to restart your mac before all of the icons change properly, as OSX caches them sometimes.

Of course, the other way to affect the change back to Neo/J icons is to reinstall Neo/J (after AW), which would then claim back the file associations (as the latest app to do so) - but that's a sledgehammer approach with a 300Mb installation + patch update. The Neo/J patches don't mess with file associations, and in my opinion, that's a sign of a well-behaved update.

- yoxi
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sardisson
Town Crier
Town Crier


Joined: Feb 01, 2004
Posts: 4588

PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 2:07 am    Post subject: Re: The Case of Disappearing .sxw Files

yoxi wrote:
When you install a new app (or a new upgrade to an app, sometimes) it will update the file associations in OSX's app database that it thinks 'belong' to it, so that it becomes the default app to open them with.


The Mac OS X rule (in the absence of a strong creator code like in the old days) has been that the last installed app (and any time you drag an app into the Applications folder or its subfolders counts as an "install" and the OS reads the Info.plist for file associations and such) that claims it can open a file type becomes the default to do so, but that seems to work only sporadically. Interestingly enough, I did not have the same experience as JimWG when I installed Abi 2.2.5; everything remained assigned to Neo/J.

Smokey

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"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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yoxi
Cipher


Joined: Sep 07, 2004
Posts: 1799
Location: Dawlish, Devon

PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 2:24 am    Post subject:

Interesting - one of the things that 'bothers' me about OSX is how some of the things it does it only does sometimes. I've noticed that it can take up to 3 restarts before some reassigned icons/apps actually reassign themselves, for example.

This is particularly true of pdfs - I tried (in my madness) to reassign pdf files to be opened by Acrobat Reader 5, as that could launch in Classic (the OSX driver for my HP printer sucketh beyond the power of words to tell it) - when that failed to be worthwhile, I Get Info'd all the pdfs back to Preview - now weeks later, I'm still finding pdfs on my hard drive that have the Acrobat icon, and start up Classic when I click on them.

Meanwhile, back on topic... so - if yer man were to drag Neo/J out of /Applications and then back in again, would that reassign its file associations?

- yoxi
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi


Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH

PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 3:49 am    Post subject:

yoxi wrote:
This is particularly true of pdfs - I tried (in my madness) to reassign pdf files to be opened by Acrobat Reader 5, as that could launch in Classic (the OSX driver for my HP printer sucketh beyond the power of words to tell it) - when that failed to be worthwhile, I Get Info'd all the pdfs back to Preview - now weeks later, I'm still finding pdfs on my hard drive that have the Acrobat icon, and start up Classic when I click on them.


I am not sure the icon issue is related. For me, file associations have always worked perfectly. The exception is that most apps that make a file get it assigned to be opened by themselves (Adobe stuff is very strict in this). So any files you might have saved with Acrobat might still be stuck on that.

Furthermore, icons tend to get horked. It happens to me all the time that a app or a file has a totally unrelated or garbled icon, but opens normally.

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"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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yoxi
Cipher


Joined: Sep 07, 2004
Posts: 1799
Location: Dawlish, Devon

PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 4:16 am    Post subject:

ovvldc wrote:
The exception is that most apps that make a file get it assigned to be opened by themselves (Adobe stuff is very strict in this). So any files you might have saved with Acrobat might still be stuck on that.

I don't have Acrobat - only Acrobat Reader. All my pdfs are created either by Preview or Neo/J. Even after I ditched AR5, I still have this problem with pdfs made by them (or occasionally the inestimable PrintToPDF, which does do type/creator to Acrobat, but once you change them they stay changed).

ovvldc wrote:
Furthermore, icons tend to get horked. It happens to me all the time that a app or a file has a totally unrelated or garbled icon, but opens normally.

I only get that problem in my Win98 launchbar Smile So I had to look up 'horked' on the 'net - what is a Ren & Stimpy, anyway? Yeah, I'll look that up too...

*update* Actually, I just tried installing AbiWord to see what would happen and it didn't affect any icons on my system. So perhaps James' app/icon management got messed up somewhere along the line. There's some useful advice here on OSXFAQ about the Launch Services (LS) database in OSX and how to rebuild it if it gets crabby.

- yoxi (who hath no tv since 1993, but is stuffed full of DVDs instead...)
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sardisson
Town Crier
Town Crier


Joined: Feb 01, 2004
Posts: 4588

PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 12:52 pm    Post subject:

LaunchServices stores different entries for extensions and type codes, so if you have some documents that only have extensions and you do an open with/change all, it will only affect the extensioned-typeless documents. You'll have to find one that has a type code set, too, and change that.

In my case, I changed all the assorted Word docs I had recieved to Neo/J over a year ago and I'm still occasionally finding ones not assigned to Neo/J. With three different type codes (WDBN, W6BN, W8BN), some with extensions and some without, some with both, that's like 12 different variations I'll have to reassign....


And yes, in theory dragging Neo/J out of Applications and back in should fix the associations, but 1) because the Info.plist file has not changed, LaunchServices might not update the database and 2) because Mac OS X is really flaky here, in practice it might not work. Sad A logout afterwards might help, since updating and refreshing caches seems to work better following a logout....

Smokey

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"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA

PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:24 pm    Post subject:

As to the "rtfd" issues, the answer to this is relatively straightforward: NeoJ (nor OOo) are aware of the Mac OS X "bundle bit". Most Mac OS X applications are aware of the bundle bit and will display them as single files. This is done automagically by Navigation Services and the Finder. OOo/Neo don't use them, however, and thus they look like folders.

I'd just file an issue indicating that we should recognize folders that have their bundle bit set as files and not folders to prevent navigation inside of bundles.

ed
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