Binary Cells¶
Some cells hold raw bytes instead of text or numbers: a picture stored in a database, a PDF, a zip. The table shows them as a short placeholder. The viewer opens them up so you can see what is inside.
Opening it¶
Right-click a binary cell and choose View contents.... There is also a View cell contents... shortcut for the selected cell. It ships unbound; give it a key under Settings > Shortcuts.
Clicking a picture in the Notebook view opens it here too.
What you see¶
Octa reads the first bytes of the cell, never a file or column name, to tell what it holds.
| Kind | What the window shows |
|---|---|
| PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, SVG | The picture and its size in pixels. A very large picture is shrunk on screen only. An SVG never loads a file or web address it points to. |
| The page count and the text of all pages. | |
| Zip | The files inside, with their sizes and dates. Nothing is unpacked. |
| Gzip | What the data unpacks to, as text or as a hex dump. Unpacking runs in the background and stops only at the limit under Settings > Performance (or never, with Unlimited ticked there). |
| JSON | The text, laid out with indentation. |
| Anything else | A hex dump of the first 64 KB. |
Text (from a PDF, a JSON cell or unpacked gzip) shows its first 256 KB. Save to file gets all of it.
A cell that looks like a picture but is damaged shows the reason and falls back to the hex dump.
Getting the bytes out¶
- Save to file... writes the cell's bytes to a file you choose. The suggested name carries the right extension.
- Open in default app writes a copy to a temporary folder and hands it to the program your system uses for that kind of file. The copy is deleted when Octa closes. Octa runs nothing itself.