To all Greetings and Happy New Year,

I have been trying to open both OBJ and PZ3 files using Notepad. All that seems to be generated is mostly small squares and lines with few letters an dots. If I need to post a screenshot I will but I'm sure you all know what this looks like. The files in question function perfectly. I just cannot open them with a text editor. How come everybody but me can do this?

Do I need to use something other than notepad or wordpad? As you all can tell this is starting to get to me. 

Last night I tried to open yet another file ( a BVH file ) and the same thing kept happening, I am starting to feel a little depressed about this. Am I just missing something basic when I try to open what is obviously a text file?

Any help in this is greatly appreciated.

Bigsplash. 

Make sure your Encoding is set to ANSI and not Unicode or something else.  It is an option when you choose to open a file.

That's really all I can think of.  I hope it helps.

Try using a different text editor.  I use EditPad Pro from http://www.jgsoft.com but he has a free version as well.  It opens pz3 files just fine.  Also, don't use Unicode as the encoding, like Thromm said.  EditPad offers Ansi as the default and then there are 3 others that I never use.

Just as a heads up, Poser 7 is using UTF-8 (no BOM) as encoding for PZ3 files. Though it won't make a difference for files that contain English characters only.

If the files are uncompressed (i.e. are actually text), then WordPad should open them (it will choke if the file is too big though).
Post a screenshot, the problem shouldn't be that difficult to sort out.

Don't forget about the compression. Any file name with an extension ending in a z is a compressed file, which will need decompression before it can be opened in a text editor.

Personally I've taken to using a CR2 editor myself, works wonderfully and keeps everything organized neatly so it's very easy to navigate the file.

The one I use is called CR2 Editor 1.51 by John Stallings.  I don't know if the program is still being supported or not but it works wonderfully and it's a free download, you can get a copy here.

http://www.morphography.uk.vu/dl.php?file=Cr2Editor151.zip

I use EditPad Lite (the free version of that mentioned above) for absolutely everything. I prefer not to use any cr2 editors of any kind.

Quote - Just as a heads up, Poser 7 is using UTF-8 (no BOM) as encoding for PZ3 files. Though it won't make a difference for files that contain English characters only.

Not familiar with all those different codepages and encodings and whatnot, so.. Are you saying Poser 7 can't read characters that contain foreign characters. Like æ ø and å for instance?

use bbedit for OS X file editing. unicode was intended for those danish or swedish characters AFAIK, but not asian characters, hence they need a separate version for japanese, and the english version of poser won't read "have's" P6j files without correction.

i think the problem is you need more beer.
just an outside observation.

Quote - Not familiar with all those different codepages and encodings and whatnot, so.. Are you saying Poser 7 can't read characters that contain foreign characters. Like æ ø and å for instance?

Quite the opposite: Poser 7 is handling those characters the same way across the board now. In previous versions, there was a potential for trouble when you used non-ASCII characters and transferred files between Windows and Mac (which use different methods for describing or , or moving files created on a Japanese system using Kana or Kanji to an English system. Poser 7 is using the same encoding on both platforms for any language.

As the rest of the forum members suggested I was able to produce a screen cap. 
This is one of my better attempts at opening up a text file.

Sorry here is the shot, as a jpg file. I hope this works.

Image4.jpg

stewer, what were the encodings for non-ASCII characters in previous versions (allowing for the variety causing potential troubles)?  Was there a BOM in use in any of these situations?

Miss Nancy - Wrong!  The entire idea of Unicode is to allow encodings of large character sets - especially Sino-Japanese Kana/Kanji, Arabic, Hebrew, European, Korean, Cyrillic, and a great number of others - You can't specify 20,000,000 different glyph characters in 8-bit ASCII (ever).  You can specify different ones - individually - this way in a limited scope (European characters can be included in 8-bit UNsigned specifications such as ASCII-Latin 1), but that fails for ideographics like Sino-Japanese and Korean.  This is why larger encodings were necessary - and this is exactly what Unicode is for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

http://www.unicode.org

My recommendation for a Poser file editor is CR2Builder. It is updated on a semi-regular basis, and can handle very large files gracefully. There are links to some help pages on the page I linked above, and a few more are linked here.

Your files are'nt .PZ3's they are comressed Poser files(.PZZ, I think)

Goto your Edit > Preferences > and find the tab with Compression, and External Binaries options.  Make sure these are both Unchecked.

Open the scene, with Poser, and resave it.  Now it should work with either WordPad, or Notepad(One or the other.)