StuffIt Compression

I have selected the StuffIt-11 compression format (.sitx) because it yields very compact archives while retaining all the Mac character and paragraph style information of the styled-text format* in which the articles have been saved. (My own archives go back several years.)

I realize that this is only useful for current Mac users but, nevertheless, it is what I’ve found retains all the information I want to keep in my own archives.

Note: If you are using Safari or Internet Explorer, you may have to Control- or Right-Click the text-archive link (the icon below the calendar date) and select the proper menu item to download the .sitx file to your hard disk.

Safari may add an additional .txt suffix to the file. Please delete this .txt suffix to reveal the file as a StuffIt .sitx file to procede with expanding.

The text-file archives are also provided in Zip format but the style information is not retained for PCs.

I can choose to retain the style information for Macs but this causes the Zip to be nearly twice the size of the comparable StuffIt file. Since this info is only useful to Macs anyway, since sitx files are about half the size of zips that retain the Mac info, and since the free StuffIt Expander will expand either sitx or zip archives, I’ve settled on sitx for Macs.

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The articles had originally been, in fact, created in the “original” (older) Nisus word-processor format, which, incredibly, in this day of numerable proprietary formats, turns out to be simply styled text—that can be opened and read by any text editor or word processor (even though style information may not be retained).

They were created using a System-7 Extension called ClippingNamer, which, instead of creating a text clipping when a selection of text is dragged to a desktop folder location, creates, instead, a word-processing document in the format of any word processor that I happen to have installed on my (older) Mac.

I’d chosen this Nisus format because I found that it can be easily opened and read by practically anything that accepts text, but, in fact, the word processor I actually use is Mariner Write.

Using this technique, I never actually “Saved” a Mariner Write document, over the period of many years, but had created hundreds of “Nisus” documents by dragging text to the desktop folder where I was saving the articles.

These are the very text files that have been archived on this site until only just recently.

Lately, however, I’ve been using Mariner Write to save the files in Simple Text format, which accomplishes the same thing as before but using my newer Mac using OS X 10.4 (Tiger).