More commonly, you will have to send the file by E-mail. Say you've just finished a brochure and you want to send it cross-country. Let's suppose that your business has two branches—one in New York and one in Los Angeles, and that both offices have Macintoshes with Microsoft Word and that you both have one of the free "Usenet software kits" for the Macintosh (not necessarily the same one). Then, you proceed as follows:
A. Using UUENCODE (or BINHEX, if you like) you convert the Microsoft
Word file to a coded text file.
B. If your mail has a size limit, you may have to break up the file
and send it in parts.
C. At the receiving end, reassemble the file and strip any headers
and trailers added by the mail system. The file should look like
begin <very first line>
M
M
M
M
end <very last line>
and be saved as a TEXT file.
D. Run UUDECODE (or BINHEX) and recover the binary file.
E. Run Microsoft Word, open the binary (MS Word!) file and print.
There may be one slight glitch. Macintosh files have two parts, a "resource" part and a "data" part. The resource part contains such information as the name of the application to run when you click on the file and how to draw the cute little icon pictures. Some of the simpler programs do not encode the resource part so you may get a generic document that you can't open by clicking on it (the infamous "application busy or missing" message). That's OK. Open it from *within* Word and then save it as a Word document. It should recover the missing parts. And get smarter software.