[texhax] MS Word & Mathtype to TeX

[Gordon Haverland]

On December 19, 2011, cornwall_5 at comcast.net wrote:
> First: wow! Thank you all for all your long detailed and varied
> responses!
[ snip ]
> It is that bewildering mess of strange filenames with file
> endings (like .gz ??)

UNIX (or the family of operating systems related to UNIX, often 
called UN*X) and Linux, and maybe others have a common philosopy 
with respect to the naming of files.  In particular, there is no 
"ending" of a filename.  The operating system does not assume any 
particular kind of content regardless of the name of the file.

There are lots of programs now, that assume a file ending in ".gz" 
is a gzip'ped file of something.  But this is not something the 
operating system imposes.

A long time ago, a program called "file" was born on UN*X, which 
looks for "magic numbers" in files, to try and find out what kind 
of file something is, by its contents (and not its name).  To look 
inside a file to determine its contents is always going to be more 
computation intensive than doing some lookup based on file 
"endings".

But, if I want to, I can name an Ogg Vorbis music file (typically 
called .ogg) with a name such as:
 a.tar.cpio.mp3.bz2.gz.A.ogg.jpeg.tiff.fred_flintstone
To the operating system, the name is just a string of characters.

Maybe this helps.
-- 
Gord