On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Wonko the Sane wrote:

> ...but as you all know i'm not a MacOS guy.  ok, found MacOS 7.5, but now i
> have a question.  do i want MacBinary or BinHex format?  this is going to be
> a clean install (not an upgrade), so which is better?

BinHex and MacBinary are just two different ways of encoding exactly the
same information.  Files on the Macintosh consists of two parts, called
forks, the "data fork" and the "resource fork".  MacBinary and BinHex are
techniques for representing the segmented nature of MacOS files in a
flat-file format as used in Unix and MS-DOS.

BinHex translates MacOS files into a stream of lines of ASCII characters.  
This format can be transferred through lots of different kinds of systems
without losing information (much like uuencoded files).  MacBinary
represents MacOS files as a stream of 8-bit binary characters.

Assuming you have software to deal with either format (Stuffit Expander
can handle both), you should use MacBinary, since it uses significantly
less space than BinHex and will consequently transfer over slow links in
less time.
-- 
Tod McQuillin