Question about documents

[philo]

I recently performed a data recovery for a friend of mine who had a
failing hard drive.

I copied their data to a few DVD's and wanted to verify the data were good.

Using Libre Office I attempted to open some documents but Libre Office
immediately closed.
I then remembered that when documents are open...it's common for a
backup file to be created so I figured the reason Libre Office crashed
was because it was trying to write the backup file to the DVD.

I then copied the file to my hard drive and it opened fine.


All well and good I guess.


However, when I attempted the same from a Windows machine...
the document opened just fine from the DVD.

Anyone know what's going on?



--
https://www.createspace.com/3707686

[Robert Heller]

A) MS-Windows / MS-Office is stupid (or clever).

B) Libre Office / Open Office is overly clever (or stupid).

Almost all of the 'Office Productivity Suites' don't provide a pure
reader / converter application, only an 'editor' application. The idea
of 'viewing' a [read-only] document simply does not exist. One can
only 'open' the document, with the *presumption* of editing it. That
is, a 'read-only' document or a read-only document viewer application
just does not exist. How the 'Office Productivity Suite' deals with a
read-only file system is esentually 'undefined'. Appearently Libre
Office / Open Office 'crashes', and MS-Office doesn't.

>
>
>

--
Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / hel...@deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
() ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments

[philo]

Thank you...but I foolishly forgot to mention that I also had Libre
Office on the Windows machine


Also: I do have Microsoft Offive running on the Linux machine (in Wine
of course) and that crashed too when attempting to read from the DVD

--
https://www.createspace.com/3707686

[Robert Heller]

It sounds like *MS-Windows* is handling an attempt to open a file with
read-write access on a read-only file system differently that how Linux
is handling an attempt to open a file with read-write access on a
read-only file system: I suspect Linux is returning a 'fatal' error and
MS-Windows is either ignoring the write access or mindlessly accepting
it (and will probably fail if/when the application actually attempts
to write or do something stupid like drop the bits on the floor). It
looks like a combination of:

A) MS-Office AND Libra Office / Open Office are stupid (not handing
certain sorts of error conditions when opening files, specificly the
sorts of errors *Linux* returns when trying to open a file with write
access on a read-only file system).

*AND*

B) *MS-Windows* is being stupid (not raising an error when trying to
open a file with write access on a read-only file system). It might
also be the case the MS-Windows somehow believes that an ISO-9660 file
system is in fact a *writable* file system, even though the ISO-9660
file system is lacking in write functionallity.

As I stated, these office suites lack a document viewer and obviously
are not able to *sanely* deal with a read-only file system.

[philo]

I thought it pretty weird.


Thanks for the reply
--
https://www.createspace.com/3707686

[Steve Hayes]

On Sun, 11 Nov 2012 14:22:55 -0600, Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote:

>A) MS-Office AND Libra Office / Open Office are stupid (not handing
>certain sorts of error conditions when opening files, specificly the
>sorts of errors *Linux* returns when trying to open a file with write
>access on a read-only file system).
>
>*AND*
>
>B) *MS-Windows* is being stupid (not raising an error when trying to
>open a file with write access on a read-only file system). It might
>also be the case the MS-Windows somehow believes that an ISO-9660 file
>system is in fact a *writable* file system, even though the ISO-9660
>file system is lacking in write functionallity.

I recently did something similar, with Lotus WordPro.

My wife wanted to instal Windows 7 on her laptop, and we were not sure whether
Lotus SmartSuite would work, so I copied a lot of .SAM and .LWP files on my
computer to a DVD.

I then put the DVD in my wife's computer and opened them with Lotus Wordpro,
which warned me that they were read-only, and that if |i wanted to save
changes i would have to save them under another name. I saved them to a USB
drive in MS Word format with no problems.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Chris Davies]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote:
> The idea of 'viewing' a [read-only] document simply does not exist. One
> can only 'open' the document, with the *presumption* of editing it.

I would beg to differ.

Whenever I download a document from a website and open it in OO or LO
I get a read-only view. I can't change anything (no edits), and none of
the formatting toolbars, etc., are present. Once I save the file locally
I get all the edit capabilities I would expect.

This read-only vs read-write differentiation is visible in OO and LO,
for Windows and Linux-based platforms.

On Linux-based systems it's driven by the effective file permissions.

Chris

[bad sector]

On 11/11/2012 10:49 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

> I recently did something similar, with Lotus WordPro.

Is that thing still around? I think I used it on the Amiga in another
life, something like 45 floppies & all :-)

[Joe Beanfish]

Perhaps your paths are configured to use the document dir for temp files
etc.? Go into libreoffice options->Paths to make sure Backups and
Temporary files point somewhere writable.

[philo]

\


I tested this again with a different document on a differt CD
and it worked fine

Maybe there was something "weird" about the DVD I made???

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https://www.createspace.com/3707686