MacWrite II to plain text converter
Background
Some years ago, I gave up my old Macintosh Classic and bought a PC
and installed Linux on that instead. In all, a much nicer environment,
but this change also meant that I suddenly had lots of documents that
I could no longer read. On the Mac I had been using MacWrite II from
Claris for a couple of years. Of course there was no Linux program
available that could read MacWrite II files. Converting all the
hundreds of files I had by opening them in MacWrite II and saving them
as plain text wasn't a very good option either, since it meant I had
to go through each single file on the now rather sluggish Mac.
Instead I started looking at how the MacWrite II file format worked
and tried to create a Perl script that would read a MacWrite II file
and output the text in a more Linux-friendly format.
Download
- MacWriteII2text.tar.gz
The Perl script to convert MacWrite II files to plain text and
documentation about the file format. All the files below are included
in this file.
- MacWriteII.html
A compilation of my current knowledge about the MacWrite II file
format. Any information you might have that can add to my
understanding of the file format is very welcome.
- Binn-Erker.MacWriteII
A sample MacWrite II file (with text in Swedish).
- NEWS
Changes since the previous version.
Problems
- The script will fail to find the beginning of the text in some
files.
- No attempt is made to preserve any of the formatting
information. This probably shouldn't be too difficult.
- Headers, footers and footnotes are ignored. Footnotes are detected
in the text and their position indicated in the output but the text is
lost.
History
- 2000-08-20
- Release of version 0.0.1. The code does pretty much the same
things as before, but the file format documentation is much improved.
- 2000-01-21
- I write a short note on freshmeat.net that version 0.0.0 is
available. This is still more or less the same code as the first
public release back in March of 1997, but with better documentation of
the file format (including some parts that are documented but not
implemented).
- 1997-12-03
- Sean Crist finds
my old comp.lang.perl.modules post and writes me since he is also
interested in deciphering the MacWrite II file format (though for
different reasons). We begin corresponding for a while and manage to
figure out quite a lot about how the file
format works. There are still lots of things that are unknown,
though.
- 1997-03-31
- I post some questions about how to create a Perl module to
comp.lang.perl-modules and also mention that I have the first version
of MacWriteII2iso available for download.
This page is maintained by Hans Persson
(unicorn@lysator.liu.se).
Last modified .
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