On Sep 7, 2020, at 7:02 AM, Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com> wrote:
On Mon, 7 Sep 2020 06:57:28 -0700, Zane Healy <
xxxxxx@avanthar.com> wrote
to Freelance Traveller:
There used to be an application on the Mac that would translate a lot fo Word Processing, and some other data. Im not sure if anything like this still exists, while still needed, they were only commercially viable in the 90s. It would be nice to find an Open Source solution for this.
I believe that current MacOS is based on FreeBSD, and many programs written
for FreeBSD will run on Macs with no issues, so don't confine your searches
to explicitly Mac - include FreeBSD in your search.
A solution that's viable for me needs to run on Windows.
For me, the OS isn’t that important, though if Windows is needed, it becomes a bit of a pain. I’m mainly Mac/UNIX/VMS here.
I started doing a little googling, and as it turns out, a good answer might be WordPerfect running on Windows. :-)
From the WordPerfect website:
"SAM, TXT, RIN, DOC, HTM, IA5, FFT, RFT, OCX, OCM, DOX, DIF, .WP, SGML.VW, WRI, WPM, WPD,
WSD, WPW, XY, XML UTF-16 BIG ENDIAN, XML UTF-16 LITTLE ENDIAN, XML
UTF-8, PSD, DXF, CAL, GIF, CGM, CPT, PAT, CDT, CMX, EPS, EMF, TIF, IMG,
TP3, PLT, JPG, PCD, PIC, PCT, MAC, DRW, PP4, BMP, PCX, PNG, WPG, CHS,
SVG, SCT, TIF, TGA, WI, BMP, CUR, EXE, WMF, ICO, WPG, WPW, XLS, DBF,
WKS, WK1, WKE, WK3, WK4, DBF, WB2, WB1, WB3, QPW, DB”
They also point to
www.openthefile.net, which looks interesting, but also looks like a privacy/security nightmare. Trying to read the privacy page, at least on a Mac, is a challenge, as it’s garbled. Still I was able to find this. "If you are located outside China and choose to provide information to
us, please note that we transfer the data, including Personal Data, to
China and process it there”.
I’ve also found
zamzar.com while looking this morning, it looks slightly more legit than
openthefile.net, but I’d still have privacy/security concerns. They appear to be based in the UK, what’s strange is they claim to support 1200+ file formats, but it’s mostly modern stuff (as in after the year 2000).
Here is an interesting option on Windows:
Digging a bit further, I found FileMerlin. It has a most impressive selection of formats it can handle, including surprisingly MASS-11.
It looks like it supports all the Word Processing formats I remember from the 80’s and 90’s. The bad news is it’s not 100% clear you can still buy it, or what versions of Windows it supports.
I finally found what I was trying to remember, MacLink-Plus from DataViz. It isn’t hard to get a copy of this off eBay, but it would require an old PPC Mac to run it.
Zane