fricking file formats

[calimac]

Finishing up a stage of work on the library catalog at my job, I prepared a report file of problem records. No problem, I thought: I'd done this before when I created the entire shelf list for the inventory. I set up the parameters in the catalog, generated the file, and saved it to a thumb drive.

Only difference was, the shelf list I had taken to FedEx and printed out. This file was to be e-mailed to the library people who'd need it. So I wasn't worried that the file format was PRNX, which I'd never heard of: I figured my computer could deal with it.

It couldn't. No program I had or could find could read it, and while Googling for "convert .prnx to .pdf" produced a lot of results revealing that PRNX was some sort of proprietary print format, none of the results whose titles said they'd show you how to convert actually did. Not one. I know, you don't believe me. But here, for instance, is one whose Google results title was "PRNX File - How to open or convert PRNX files". Can you see from here how to open or convert them? I sure can't.

So, I thought, I know from previous experience that at least the FedEx printer can print them. I'll print it out and then use their scanner to scan it as a PDF. I've had to do weirder things than that.

But it couldn't. The FedEx printer didn't recognize the format.

Phone the catalog program vendor. Learn that instead of using the "Save As" command near the left of the tool bar I should have used the "Export" command near the right of the tool bar. That's the one that creates PDFs. Obviously I'd gotten it right when I made the shelf list, but had completely forgotten about it in the two months since then. Gently suggest to the vendor that this is not intuitive. This hadn't occurred to them. Sigh.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that website seems to be part of a pattern where some people set up tens of thousands of pages automatically, each one differing just by a given search term, in the hope that you'll click on a link in google and see an advert, thus earning them a few cents.

Sadly there's a lot of this nonsense about, which makes finding anything useful hard.

[calimac]

Thanks for the explanation; I was kind of wondering what the point was. But usually on such searches I can find a link to a conversion program somewhere; in this case I looked at some 15 links and couldn't find anything helpful, although some of them tried harder than this one did, so I ddon't think they were all this kind of wallpaper.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I had a quick look about, and it may be that the issue here is that only the one program works with these files, and it's not widely used. So either you're using that (and therefore presumably have access to the manuals and support from the company) or you aren't, and therefore are just completely stuck.

[calimac]

Well, I do have access to support from the company that gave me this file, and what they told me was to use the "Export" instead of the "Save As" command, which is what generates a PDF. I can understand using a proprietary printer format when sending the file directly to the printer, but what baffled me is, why use it for "Save As"?

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. I think I see. Possibly.

"Save As" tends to be used for saving the data in a format which the application can reload and continue working on. So, in this case the application can save a PRNX file with your data in it. It can also reload a PRNX file to continue working on it. So you can load and save those files, and "Save As" is used as a shortcut for saving it in a new file if you want to keep an existing file rather than overwriting it with your latest set of changes.

Some applications can work in a variety of file formats - saving a Doc, or a Docx, or an RTF, or a variety of other file formats (as opposed to printer formats - these are all ways of structuring the data inside the file for reading back later, as opposed to different ways of structuring a page for printing). So Save As might (for instance) allow MS Paint to save your file as a PNG or a JPEG or a BMP - but it can also read all of those formats for later editing.

But your can't load a PDF file back in and continue working on its data. It can only create them with a visual version of the data. Which is thus an "Export" - because it's leaving the application forever, once it's been written out it can't be read back in for further editing.

Apologies for however much of this you already know, or any bits of this which don't make sense. It's been a long day and there's a grumpy child two feet to the left of me.

*I assume, most applications can't edit PDFs, they're notoriously hard to work with.