[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by tompe

Of course. But why increase the probability for it?

And if you are proofing a text it must be better to start with a version you have proofed three times already then start from scratch.

You miss my point.

What if you are unhappy with a previously created version of the book, because errors weren't corrected? (Distributed Proofreaders has immensely raised the quality of PG texts. Some of the earlier ones created before that effort began contributing have problems.)

You probably won't want to extract the text from the existing file and correct it. Simpler to start clean fron your own corrected source text.

When I installed a zip program in Windows it said something about not being free and I was unsure if I could use it to create files to distribute. But I might just have downloaded the wrong version or misread something.

No archive utility I am aware of imposes limits on what you may do with the archives it creates. There are a lot of archivers that can create zip files. Some, like 7zip, are free and open source. Some are free and closed source. Some are shareware and require a fee for full usage. But the zip format itself is not encumbered. For the most part, you can use any archiver that creates zip files to make one, and any other archiver to extract it.

I am really a Unix and open source (or GNU) person and only uses Windows under protest... So I usually send tar files to people asking for zip files (rar-program can unpack them).

Cultural difference, I think. RAR is much more widely used in Europe. In the US, Zip is the dominant format, and many computer users may never have heard of RAR. The only places I see RAR files are things like Usenet binary groups, because RAR offers a bit better compression, has special support for multimedia files, makes it simple to create multi-part archives for posting, and has better recovery options if parts of a multi-part RAR file are damaged in transit.

Google's GMail won't accept RAR files as attachments, apparently because they can't open them to check for possible malware. (They can examine Zip files.) This is annoying, because Eugene Rorshal issued public domain C code years ago to open and extract RAR archives, and reportedly offered to help Google integrate his code, but was turned down. If Gmail becomes popular in Europe, they'll need to rethink that decision.

But open source code to create/extract Zip files has been available for Unix/Linux/*BSD for a long time.

What do you use to create RAR files?

Of course there can be reasons. If you have lost your source files for example.

Or if you never had them in the first place, because you want to extract a Mobi file someone else built.

So there are no non-third part programs that unpacks a MobiPocket file.

Well, none that unpack a High Compression file. At least, I don't know of any.
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Dennis