Now here's a mind-numbing problem...

J

jhilgeman

Guest
I work side-by-side with a graphic designer - he does print work on an iMac, I do web graphics on a Windows box. I needed one of his fonts (he uses Suitcase to organize them), so we tried to copy it from his machine via FTP, but that's not working - I basically get 0-byte files.

I logged into his machine via telnet and took a look at the files, and all of those files say they're 0 bytes. However, when we look at the fonts on his system via Finder, the files look perfectly fine and range anywhere from 44k to 120k. At first I thought that maybe it was symbolic link or something, but that's not the case.

So basically - everything says that the files are 0 bytes long except for Finder (and he can use those fonts w/o any problem). I've double-checked - there's no duplicate files so we're all looking at the same set of files. It's got me stumped. Any thoughts (besides that his Mac secretly hates my PC)?

- Jonathan
 
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S

stew

Guest
mac fonts dont work with pc's and i think its also true that pc fonts dont work with mac's - yeah tis quite a pickle although there may be software which allows mac and cp fonts ot eb sed on the otehr system.
 
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J

jhilgeman

Guest
stew said:
mac fonts dont work with pc's and i think its also true that pc fonts dont work with mac's - yeah tis quite a pickle although there may be software which allows mac and cp fonts ot eb sed on the otehr system.

Not to sound rude, but that isn't the point anymore. Now I'm trying to figure out why his Mac's Finder says that the files have data in them, but everything else (including looking at the file sizes through his terminal/shell) says the files have absolutely nothing in them - 0 bytes.

I don't know if it's something to do with Suitcase or something...

- Jonathan
 
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Your Mac's Specs
G5•2x1.8•1.5•320•8x+/-
2 different OS, with 2 different file systems = a bunch of different stuff

i think its a "windows cant read mac (HFS+) binaries" problem.
 
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J

jhilgeman

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MacAddikt said:
2 different OS, with 2 different file systems = a bunch of different stuff

i think its a "windows cant read mac (HFS+) binaries" problem.

Good guess, but no cigar. Remember, if I look at the file size through the shell (this is on the Mac - my machine has no involvement in this method), it says 0 bytes. So even the Mac really knows that it's 0 bytes but if you're using the regular OS X GUI, everything seems fine and dandy.

So to recap - if I look at the files on the system level (should show the true size), it says 0 bytes. Something else is telling the Mac OS X that the files aren't 0 bytes when you look at them in Finder and stuff.

- Jonathan
 
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and the font works on his computer?
 
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shadov

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MacAddikt said:
2 different OS, with 2 different file systems = a bunch of different stuff

i think its a "windows cant read mac (HFS+) binaries" problem.
Windows can't read HFS+, not sure about mac font file format. But that doesn't have anything to do with file sizes not showing correctly. File format has nothing to do with filesystem.

I'm quite sure it works something like this: When you connect to mac from windows (via telnet or ftp), your client software asks the server software on the mac to show a file. This happens over telnet or ftp protocol and has nothing to do with filesystem. Now the server software asks microkernel to give it that file using a system call defined in a C library. Again nothing to do with filesystem. Microkernel checks and sees that the file is on a HFS+ partition, so it calls a module that handles HFS+ input/output to get the file.
Microkernel doesn't need to know how to handle HFS+ i/o, ftp server doesn't need to know in what filesystem the file is and ftp client doesn't need to know even what OS the server is running on.

After the file has been transfered to windows machine, windows should be able to tell it's file size even if it doesn't know how to handle the file format.

I'm not sure what is broken this time, but it seems to be quite low level stuff. Are there any other files that behave similary or is it just the fonts?
 

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