Saving with NWP breaks Quick Look for .doc files

Derick · Post by **Derick** » 2008-04-19 09:47:09

I have a number of .doc files . When I view one with Quick Look in the Leopard Finder, it displays the content as expected. However, if I open one, edit it, and save it with NWP, Quick Look stops working: instead of the file contents, Quick Look just displays a NWP doc icon.

Likewise if Finder is set to Show Icon Preview, it shows the previews for .a doc file until I open & save it. Then the preview for that file is replaced with the NWP doc icon.

Quick Look is one of the more useful features of Leopard - it would be nice if NWP didn't progressively disable its functionality with respect to .doc files.

Derick · Post by **Derick** » 2008-04-19 09:56:50

FYI this happens with the beta of 1.1 as well.

dshan · Post by **dshan** » 2008-04-20 23:48:54

This happens because NWP (and NWX) doesn't save .doc files in binary Word format, it saves them in RTF format but with a .doc filename suffix. This is perfectly acceptable and compatible with MS Word but it sometimes trips up 3rd party apps (e.g. Mac OS X's Quick Look, the iPhone, Documents to Go on PalmOS, etc.) that expect files with .doc suffixes to contain only Word binary format data.

If you save them as regular NWP documents with the .rtf suffix or change the .doc suffix to .rtf on the ones you saved using NWP Quick Look will handle them just fine.

Derick · Post by **Derick** » 2008-04-22 06:05:26

Thanks, renaming works as a stopgap.

But -- given that OS X uses UTIs to identify files rather than file extensions, and that Quick Look identifies files by their UTIs (it doesn't use the file extension at all -- I've been digging into the Quick Look documentation for another project.....), it should be possible for NWP to change the UTI to public.rtf when saving, I believe. This would relieve the user of needing to rename each time.

Post by **martin** » 2008-04-22 13:46:25

Derick wrote:But -- given that OS X uses UTIs to identify files rather than file extensions, and that Quick Look identifies files by their UTIs (it doesn't use the file extension at all -- I've been digging into the Quick Look documentation for another project.....), it should be possible for NWP to change the UTI to public.rtf when saving, I believe.

This is actually not possible. A file's UTI is not a stored piece of information on OSX, it is merely derived from other information like the file's extension.