sloppy conversion of .wpd files

[G. S.]

cat filename.wpd | strings > filename.txt

This will extract the text, if you just need to read the suckah and
don't care about formatting. Works in OS X. Thanks to the person on
usenet who showed me this, may you be blessed with good health, good
relationships, and lots of money.

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

That's a great tip.

Word will also do this with File>Open if you change "Show" to "Recover Text
from Any File".

Having done that, explicitly open another document with File>Open and put
"Show" back to how you had it. "Show" is a "sticky" setting (it's a design
bug that they WON'T fix...). If you do not reset, you will open all
documents as plain text for ever more :-)

Cheers

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 19 Dec 2002 10:16:22
-0800, groko...@yahoo.com (G. S.):

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Please post all comments to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:jo...@mcghie-information.com.au

[G. S.]

The slight advantage of using cat is that you can have entourage save
all wordperfect files in a folder called "stupid attachments", then
use applescript or cron to automatically convert them to text for you!

"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<1dp40v48rtqtfr921...@4ax.com>...

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Yep. Good idea.

Or you can make a Word macro that will search your whole system for .WPD
files and convert the lot at once.

Cheers

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 20 Dec 2002 10:52:49
-0800, groko...@yahoo.com (G. S.):

> The slight advantage of using cat is that you can have entourage save
> all wordperfect files in a folder called "stupid attachments", then
> use applescript or cron to automatically convert them to text for you!
>
> "John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<1dp40v48rtqtfr921...@4ax.com>...
> > That's a great tip.
> >
> > Word will also do this with File>Open if you change "Show" to "Recover Text
> > from Any File".
> >

All Spam blocked with SpamNet: a free download from http://www.cloudmark.com/

[G. S.]

Will Word for the Mac convert wordperfect files? I was under the
impression it couldn't.

"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<s8a70vgtrn3q75uvv...@4ax.com>...

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Older versions will. They removed the WPD converter around Word 98, I
think. But the converter, if you still have it, is alleged to work in Word
2001. (I am not sure on that: certainly the WPD converter for Word 97
continues to word in Word 2002 if you still have it). The "converter" is
actually a Mac OS program, which means it won't run under Unix (OS X).

Microsoft stopped issuing the converter, basically because they could never
get it exactly right: the structural differences between Word and
WordPerfect mean that there is not enough information in a WordPerfect file
to enable a fully correct conversion into Word.

However, in versions of Word since Word 98, you have the ability to open a
file in "Recover Text from Any File" mode. If you do that to a WordPerfect
document (any flavour) you get the whole text out of the thing perfectly.

You then need to make a macro to race through and strip the WP formatting
commands from the result. You can use many of these commands to apply Word
styles, so you end up with a document in Word that is mostly correctly
formatted.

If you have to do a lot of this, post again and I will show you how to do
it.

Cheers

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 22 Dec 2002 11:29:06
-0800, groko...@yahoo.com (G. S.):

[G. S.]

When I "recover any text" from the .wpd attachments send me, they look
like this:

From:
James M
&#8730;
COMMUNICATOR
&#8730;
Date:
Wed, Dec 11, 2002 3:53 PM
&#8730;
Subject: ƒ
Proximity Locks

–
(#Ä%ÿ'0*à,‡.81ê3Ë5@8ò:&#63743;<H?†A¯CPF®H
*Please print this out and post it in your areas so that all full time
employees will be aware of this change.ƒ

It's certainly readable, but you had mentioned being able to write a
macro that would apply formatting, etc. and I guess I'm asking for
more help.

note: the files are sent with a ".doc" extension. I am not sure if
that is because the office thinks that will automagically convert them
to Word. Regardless, then don't load.

"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<95gc0vo1pl8drtoni...@4ax.com>...

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

WordPerfect uses ".doc" as the extension in later versions. Apocryphal
stories suggest that Corel did this because they discovered it would crash
Microsoft Word (it used to...) :-)

To sort this out, you write a macro to do a series of searches for the
various fixed strings that turn up, then apply Word styles to format the
text appropriately.

Unless you are skilled at VBA, it's a lot quicker to race through the
document and simply apply the correct styles by hand.

I am afraid this one crosses the line between "assistance" and "paid work".
I could put something together for you, but the time it would take would go
way beyond the time I have to spend on these news groups -- sorry about
that.

Hint: If the document is less than 200 pages, do it by hand. If you have
Word properly set up, it will take about half an hour to format a 200-page
document from the ASCII: you would have to be facing thousands of pages
before creating a macro would be worth it.

Hope this helps

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 6 Jan 2003 08:46:02
-0800, groko...@yahoo.com (G. S.):

[G. S.]

Thanks, you've given me more than enough information to cobble
something together, and I appreciate it. I wish google would put a
"paypal" link at the bottom of usenet posts for microtipping. Anyway,
your Whuffie scores are shooting up!

(see http://www.boingboingl.net for a free copy of "down and out in
the magic kingdome" and the included explanation of what "Whuffie" is)

Many thanks from an aspiring technical writer.

"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<i3tj1v04rgf2nal6u...@4ax.com>...