Re: cannot save file - disk full error?

In article <C305EAEC.8131%john@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
John McGhie <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Robert:

On 6/09/07 1:26 AM, in article
missinglink-0C2AD3.11261705092007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "RobertB"
<missinglink@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

No, the document is not corrupt. It's a very irritating bug in the way
Word
and Apple cooperate (or rather: don't...) when talking to the file
subsystem.

Is that a derivative of using Rosetta technology?

Not that we know of. It's actually an error in the way Apple OS is
responding to the file write command. Word doesn't do a straight "write" of
a file, it "streams" the file to disk. That only works some of the time in
OS X. But I have never managed to get either Apple or Microsoft to tell us
exactly what this bug is, despite the fact that it has been around for about
four years and they have both made multiple attempts to fix it.

"only works some of the time?" Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I
would assume file writes are controlled by the file system not the
application.



The error literally means "Unable to write to the file or its temporary
file". When they wrote the error message back in the days of floppy
disks,
they assumed the most likely cause was that the disk was full.

About time to update the error message, isn't it?

Well, yeah, except: what would they update it to?

"Word can't figure out what to do with this file?"

If the file system is
working correctly, the most likely cause of a write failure IS that the
media is full :-) Since when this happens, Word can't see the disk at all,
it actually has no idea what is wrong... It seemed a safe enough assumption
at the time that an operating system would *always* save a file correctly
unless the destination media really was full!!

Reminds me of those old "out of memory" errors one used to see in days
gone by. However, I've seen disk full errors even as far back as Windows
3.1 -- bogus disk full errors.


Airport? I don't use Airport on this iMac, but I'm a couple of Airport
Extreme updates behind (since the machine has an Airport card).

Try the update: It may change something in the networking software that
resolves the problem.

And how on earth is Airport networking related to Word's view of the
file system?

..../...

Things seem fine today. Another possible cause, which I failed to
mention, is that the original document has macros in it and apparently
some linked files. It was most certainly created on a Windows machine
and I have never gotten a Windows Word document with macros to translate
properly to OS X. Usually, it can't find some file the macro is
pointing to. There are also some graphic conversions going on when I
open the file.

If the file has come in with a Template attached, and the template is not
available on the Mac, Word will get into a knot trying to reach the
template. You might try checking Tools>Templates and Add-ins. If the
template attached to the file is not available on your Mac, switch it for
one that is. Unless you check the "Update styles on open..." box, this will
have no effect other than to prevent Word looking for a template it will
never find...

That box is unchecked. When I opened the document, the template was
simply listed as Normal. However, there are lots of styles in this
document, none of which I created (I should also add that this file came
from a European office using Windows of some flavor -- and it's in
French).

--
"Never believe anything until it's officially denied."
.

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