[milhous]

Try to save an Office document with more than 31 characters (I think) and it will tell you that the filename is too long. Understanding that this limitation exists for backwards compatibility I don't care for it since i don't use OS 9 anymore. Is this limitation implemented at the Operating System or Application level?

Made it to 800!

[Phoenix1701]

Application level. In fact, the Microsoft Office suite are just about the only applications out there that impose that limit anymore. That said, Panther won't remove it because there's nothing to remove: the limitation was gone the moment Mac OS X 10.0.0 hit the shelves. The only way to fix Microsoft's ineptitude is to wait for Microsoft to fix its own ineptitude, a fact that elucidates much of my reasons for preferring Macs.

[Chuckit]

Basically, there was an old way for programs to refer to files that could only handle 31 characters, which was all HFS allowed anyway. After Apple came out with HFS+, it introduced a new way of referring to files that could handle the longer filenames. The reason Word can't handle long filenames is that Microsoft just hasn't gotten around to using this "new" interface yet. It's really not so much for backward-compatibility (since Word no longer runs on OS 9, to my knowledge) as it is just Microsoft slacking off. You can rename your Word document to anything up to 256 characters in the Finder and it'll work fine there, though Word still won't read the name correctly (it'll come out as something like "My Word document with#56774.doc").

[Jonesy]

Unfortunately Apple are still doing this themselves. AppleWorks (which is desparately in need of a big update) performs the same tricks with long filenames.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
Basically, there was an old way for programs to refer to files that could only handle 31 characters, which was all HFS allowed anyway. After Apple came out with HFS+, it introduced a new way of referring to files that could handle the longer filenames. The reason Word can't handle long filenames is that Microsoft just hasn't gotten around to using this "new" interface yet.

More specifically, MS is most likely using an outdated data type called FSSpec to refer to files. FSSpec was what the Classic Mac OS used. It refers to a file's file system ID rather than the file path, which is why you could always move files while they were open, and when you saved the file it would know where the file went and save to the new location.

Of course, FSSpec had the limitation that it assumed a maximum filename length of 31 characters, so if you tried to read or write a file's filename, you would be limited to 31 characters. For this reason, Apple introduced a new data type with OS X called FSRef which allows long filenames. But two years later, MS seems to still be using the old FSSpec data type.

[krove]

I believe Adobe Illustrator 10 still has this problem as well (highly annoying, too).

[geekwagon]

So does Quicktime Player. At least it can open files with longer filenames, but you can see in the titlebar that it has truncated the name and added those 4 random characters to the end. And it just beeps at you when you type more than 32 characters for a save filename.

At least in Jaguar. I haven't tried it under Panther.

[simon steiner]

the lastest 10.3 beta QT player allows long file names

[Terri]

Adobe GoLive also has this problem.

[clarkgoble]

I think GoLive may intentionally do this for compatibility with brain dead servers though. I strongly dislike this, btw. I had some online documentation with each file named after the api call and this really screwed things up.

[Terri]

It really is a mess with long URLs. I always name my site with the URL so that when I view it locally in my browser I can then remove the part that points to my local drive and hit return so that it goes to the version online. If the URL is longer then 31 characters then GoLive is unable to save the site.

Also I have images with file names longer then 31 characters and it replaces part of the file name with some strange number.

I only work with *nix servers so it is a constant problem.

[Mediaman_12]

At least the 31 characters don't include the path like Windows does. you may be able to have 200+ characters but if the file is deaply buried on a file system you could easly be down to less than 10.
Why whould you nead such long names, it's the file name, not the 'story of the file'. On the URL thing I much prefer the name of the URL to have nothing to do with the URL it's self, they I don't have to have loads of files with names looking like http://w...is.url on the desktop.

[Targon]

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
Application level. In fact, the Microsoft Office suite are just about the only applications out there that impose that limit anymore.

CD Text in Toast has a file character limit, nearly ALL audio apps have file character limits, iCab has a file character limit.

Gee i wish Carbon developers just cared about us

[larkost]

A note on the CD text.. this is because there is a limit in many versions of Windows on how many characters they allow. So toast is insuring that the Cd can be used on all versions. I believe if you change the CD to use the Joliet system you can go longer (but are still limited in what characters you use)