Converting old word processor files

Wednesday, 27 December, 2006

A while back I had occasion to look at some old files I had created as part of my MSc Thesis. These were generated in WordPerfect 5.1, a fantastic, state-of-the-art, DOS word processing package that really could “do it all”. And I really did shell out the ~£250 for it. Well, times fell hard for WordPerfect and they eventually passed from Novell to Corel and remain plugging away in the background. This brings up the first lesson of format conversion; if a new version of the product exists it should be able to import all the old files pretty well. And at less than $100 WordPerfect is pretty cheap.

Of course you may not want to shell out any cash which brings up the second lesson (and warning!) of data conversion. Use something else! Microsoft Word has always vaunted its WordPerfect conversion facility (back in the days of Word 2), however it is far from perfect and on most of my documents makes a right dogs dinner of them.

The final lesson in format conversion is actually to use the software itself! If you still have it sitting on an old PC then you might be able to fire it up, edit the document, print it out or whatever. The alternative is to re-install on your nice new shiny PC. Which would work if it was running DOS (Windows 3, 95, 98, ME), but NOT (without problems) if it is running Windows NT, 2000, XP or Vista. Whilst the command window is certainly “DOS-like”, it is not DOS and there are many compatibility issues. Indeed my install of WordPerfect half worked, but would do some very strange things, then keel over and die. The alternative, which is used in many other areas of computing, is to get a DOS emulator and run WordPerfect inside that. And games fanatics, keen on maintaining playability for some of the classic DOS games, have come to the rescue in the form of DOSBox. Its a DOS emulator (doh!) and you just run your word processor from inside it. Simple to install and it worked perfectly!!

So that gets your original processor working on your new machine, from which you can load your original document and, indeed, edit it. What do you then do with it?? Well you could export it in to another format, but the real issue is preservation of the file content and layout. Which means you need a page layout document and, yes, PDF is the ideal candidate. Of course PDF is just post-script and all the decent word processors from the DOS era had postscript printer drivers. All you have to do is install a postscript printer driver (I went for an HP LaserJet), print the document to a file and then use Acrobat Pro to convert this to a standard PDF. It all works rather neatly and you can see the results in my MSc thesis!

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