I see it, but can’t open it

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Raimon
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I see it, but can’t open it

Post by Raimon »

Hello, Claude.
I got a problem with lx o my ipad i recently bought. I can create and store plots but cannot open plots a have created on my computer and stored on google drive. There must be there is something i missed or do wrong. When i try to open a file thru the explore tab i can see the document, but it appears as a text file i’m not able to click on. I have tried with both old and new documents and made shure lx is not open on the computer and the ipad at the same time, export documents from drive to icloud, transfer them to my ipad via mail, etc. I think i need some help

Thank you.
Ipad pro. OS Version 11.2.2[/img]
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Post by admin »

Google Drive does not play nice with other apps on iPad. It does not do what other cloud storage apps such as Box and Dropbox do. Which, is to look up what apps are associated with a particular file extension and offer to open the file in those apps. In fact, for a time last year, Google Drive even hijacked other file extensions so that they would be opened in Google Drive rather than the app that created them. (This has now been fixed for major apps like Microsoft Word.)

What appears to be happening with .lxxplot files is that Google Drive is reading the contents of the file and then deciding how to treat it, rather than respecting the file extension. LXPlot files are based on XML. The first line(s) in an xml file identify it as XML and provide other information about how to read the following contents. Google Drive must be looking at the contents of the .lxxplot file because when you try to Drive to Files, it adds a .xml extension to it. The only way it could know that an .lxxplot file has xml contents is by peeking inside.

Yes, you read that right, Google is reading the contents of your files stored on Drive. Its outside the scope of this question to speculate on what other information Google might be obtaining from your files and how it might be using that knowledge. But, its worth considering before you use Google services.

The good news is that LXSeries applications for the most part do not care about the prolog lines that identify the .lxxplot file as having xml content. So, the latest version of LXFree and LXBeams 5.1.3 (13326.1) have an additional preference in the File / XML tab that allows you to skip the prolog when saving a .lxxplot file. Both of these applications as well as LXBeams2Go for iPad will read a .lxxplot file without the prolog, which they ignore anyway. (this is true even of older versions of these three applications).

Files saved without the xml prolog and stored on Google Drive work as expected. Google drive displays an action to "Copy to LXBeams2Go" as one of the things you can do with the file.

There are some remaining issues with opening an external file into LXBeams2Go that will be solved with version 2.7.0 which is waiting on approval from Apple before becoming available for download. Expect to see the 2.7.0 update in the AppStore in the next few days. (Box works with 2.6.0 without a problem. Drive-with files saved with no prolog and Dropbox cause LXBeams2Go to hang on import. Which, necessitates quitting and restarting the App.)

Older versions of LXFree for Java do not handle the lack of a prolog correctly. The latest version, 1.9.0, does. And, LXFree for Java 1.9.0 also has a format option to save files without the xml prolog like the latest Mac apps.
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