There are three preference dialog boxes, available by choosing an option from “Preferences” under the File menu.
Miscellaneous
Look inside each file to determine if it is a zip file. By default, when you choose “Open…” from the File menu, ZipIt will display any file that has a type of ‘TEXT’, ‘pZIP’, ‘ZIP ’, or ‘????’. However, you may have Zip files with other file types, or you may want to display only the real zip files. This option reads each file to determine whether it is a real zip file before displaying it in the “Open…” dialog box. This is slightly slower, but will display all zip files, and only zip files (not regular text files). For you advanced types out there, ZipIt checks to see if the first two characters of each text file are PK; if so, it assumes that the file is a zip file. In order to accept self-extracting archives, ZipIt will also display any file beginning with the letters MZ; consequently, all IBM executable files will be displayed by ZipIt, whether or not they are actually zip archives.
Note: If you find that ZipIt crashes in, or immediately after, the “Open…” dialog box, you have a system extension that interferes with this option. Go to this dialog box and uncheck “Look inside each file…”, and the crashes should end.
Do not put up notification dialog boxes while in the background. Under System 7 or MultiFinder, ZipIt may need to inform you of something while it is in the background. Normally, if ZipIt has to inform you of some fact, it will put up a dialog box (using the Notification Manager) telling you what it has to tell you, then allow you to continue to work (after dismissing the alert). Enabling this option will make ZipIt flash its icon in the Apple menu or applications menu and wait for you to switch it into the front before telling you anything. This may be less disruptive if you are working on something and do not want ZipIt to interrupt you.
Open an untitled window when first starting up. This option is on by default. It has ZipIt open an empty, untitled window when it first starts up if no documents were chosen from the Finder. If you turn this option off, then ZipIt will not open any windows when it starts up.
Always replace existing files; do not ask. If you are extracting files and choose “Save all,” then ZipIt will continue to extract files in the same folder unless it tries to extract a file with the same name as a file already existing. In this situation, ZipIt will normally ask you what to do in the form of another “Save” dialog box. If you select this option, then ZipIt will not ask you what to do; instead, it will simply replace any existing files with the same name as a file that ZipIt is extracting with the extracted file. This option is potentially dangerous, as ZipIt might overwrite some of your files.
By default, smart-strip linefeeds from text files. If this is set, then ZipIt will attempt to figure out whether linefeeds should be stripped from text files when you unzip from an archive created on a computer other than the Macintosh. This preference should generally be set; you may always override ZipIt’s recommendation by clicking in the LF column for the file in question.
Allow duplicate file names. If set, ZipIt will allow you to add two files with the same name to the archive. When you add files, ZipIt remembers two forms of the name: the Macintosh name and the MS-DOS name. If this option is off, then ZipIt will not let you add the files “Testing12.txt” and “Testing13.txt” because the MS-DOS names of both would be TESTING1.TXT. If this option is on, ZipIt does not check.
Convert all filenames to PC-compatible format. Controls whether or not ZipIt maintains a DOS filename for all files inside the zip archive. If set, all files in a ZipIt archive can be unzipped on an IBM. If not set, ZipIt only performs enough conversion to allow the files to be unzipped on a Unix system; IBM users will have to rename files. See the section entitled “MacBinary and ZipIt filenames” for more details.
Enable zoom rectangles. Controls whether or not you see a “zoom” effect when you enter and exit folders.
(The following three options are not available if you have Internet Config installed.)
Binary file type. This allows you to set the Macintosh file type with which non-Macintosh binary files are stored when unzipped onto the Mac.
Binary file creator. This allows you to set the Macintosh file creator with which non-Macintosh binary files are stored when unzipped onto the Mac.
Text file creator. This allows you to set the Macintosh file creator with which non-Macintosh text files are stored when unzipped onto the Mac. All text files have the file type ‘TEXT.’
Compression
Archive file type… Leave this at ‘ZIP’ unless your terminal program has problems sending your created zip archives, and IBM users cannot use them. If you send files to IBM users over America Online, you may need to change this to ‘TEXT’.
Use MacBinary… These options allow you to specify when MacBinary should be used by default. See the section on MacBinary, above, for more details. Remember that you can always change whether or not MacBinary is to be used on an unsaved file by clicking in the circle in the “MacBinary” column of the zip window.
Default compression… See section entitled “PKZip 2.04g” below.
Pretend to be Unix Zip: If your archives are going to be unzipped on a Unix platform, you might want to check this option. (If not, the option is harmless and can be checked anyway.) Older versions of Unix unzip have a bug in which, if this option is not selected, any archive that ZipIt creates will be unzipped on the Unix end with the permissions set to 0. If this happens, it can be remedied by typing chmod a+r <filename>.
Extensions
This dialog box allows you to set up extension mapping. For instance, you may for some reason be dealing with a lot of GIF files inside of zip archives. (This is just an example; in reality, you should never compress GIF files since they are already compressed.) You could then map all files ending in .GIF to your favorite graphics program simply by filling in the correct fields of this dialog box and choosing “Add”. If you don’t know the file type and creator, you can either choose one from the popup menus or click “Choose Example…”. That will permit you to choose an existing GIF file, for instance, on your hard disk, and fill in the fields for you.
In this dialog box, you must also tell ZipIt whether the specified extension represents a text file or not. This setting will override any information present in an individual zip file; if the “Text file” box is checked, then ZipIt will assume all files ending with that extension are text files, otherwise it will assume that all such files are binary.
The Extensions dialog box is not available if you have Internet Config installed. Instead, you should use the Internet Config application to modify extension mappings.
