I need to edit some MAT files on my Mac. I've read the tutorials, but they begin with... "open the MAT file on your word processor..." I've found that my word processor (Appleworks) won't recognize the .pz2 files. Is there a way to "trick" into seeing the files?

Do you have TextEdit? You do if you've got OS X. TextEdit will open .pz2 files. If you're still on OS 9 then go to www.versiontracker.com and do a search for word/text processors. Find a free one and try it out. There's one there for OS 9 called "Haxial TextEdit" and it's freeware. I'd try that one. Good luck! :-)

I don't have Appleworks so I don't know if this will work or not but you could also try changing the file's extension from .pz2 to .txt or .doc and then see if Appleworks will recognize it. I'd duplicate the file and work on a copy for safety.

The coolest text editor you could get would be BBEdit. They have a free 'lite" version that is still feature packed, and the full version is not very expensive. Check it out. http://www.barebones.com/ You can probably open these poser files in whatever you have now. The trick is to tell the program to open "any file" or "simple text" or something like that. The poser files are just ascii text files with unique extensions. If your program can read a .txt file it can read a Poser file.

Yes, I agree that BBEdit is the way to go with obj, pz2 or cr2 files. Make a duplicate file, rename it, drag it onto BBEdit (OS 9.x), edit it, then hit "Save" and it retains the correct line formatting and type/creator codes in the new file.

I use BBEdit lite myself and works great. And if you "save as..." you'll have to run the file through Macconverter.

Simpletext should open them, incidently, as long as they aren't too big. Are you trying to open them from "File,Open (and show all files if there is that option)", incidently? Double-clicking isn't going to do it, as it will just start Poser, as I'm sure you know.

Don't work on Poser files with a wordprocessor - they tend to mess up the formating. Quoll et al are right that BBEditLite is reliable. BTW, if you get Poser files in PC format and want to look at and/or edit, BEFORE you run them through MartinC's nifty converter, you can drag their PC icons to BBEdit's icon (or its alias' icon) and they open. (Guess if you have a batch to do, you could convert them all to PC format, and back to Mac when you're done.) Elisa/gryffnn