exotic methods?

[infinitelo]

Im working on a project that includes emailing a formated text file as an attachment. My instructions to the users included saving the attachment to the hard drive and opening it with the edit command to print. This has consistantly worked on a large variey of os's and printer combinations.

The end users would like to double click on the attachment to print/view.

My responce to this has been that due to the nature of the file (ascii text with no form feeds) programs like wordpad, notepad word ect.. will not print consistantly without setting printer and page properties(differnt for each user) and that this is the better way to do things.
Also the size of the file will vary and at some point it will be too large for notepad and I felt this would confus the users more than useing the dos editor (if it get too big for that ill use type > prn to print.
I dont thing the company is willing to purchase adobe page maker for me so please avoid using special software solutions.

 

[DSummZZZ]

So are you asking a question or what? If the users want to double-click on an attachment to open it, there's not much control you have over it other than giving the attachment a file extention that Wordpad or MS Word or whatever will recognize, unless you have them configure their computer to start a certain program upon double-clicking your attachment. These are system associations that either need to be set by the user or by changing the registry.

Dave S.

 

[dgrewe]

Have you thought of changed the "Formated Text File" to an "HTML-4 Formated File". The file will then fit into the browser window formated the way the user is used to seeing web files. Now in-this-day-in-time what computer does not have a browser installed?
David W. Grewe
Dave@internationalbid.com

 

[infinitelo]

Thanks for the respond guys I tried using a special extention, and associating that extintion with ms dos edit, but found the set up procedure a little to hard for thease guys. The html solution i think would be best, but i need to update my book collection (Ive been using one on html 3 for all my markup.) i think a cascading syle sheet with pageafter markup would work.
then i had a really stupid idea. email a pif pointing at dos edit and the attachment drag the attachments from outlook to desktop, then drag and drop the file to the pif PRESTO CHANGEO. im going to keep the extention change to prevent double click into note/wordpad.
If this is too hard for them ill have to go with html solution, gotta buy a book.

If two solutions present themselves they will pick the one you reject.