On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 17:23 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: > On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Alex Hewitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > A friend of ours wrote a bunch of recipe files using something called > > Microsoft Write. > > Yah, "Windows Write" is/was one of the "accessories" that came with > Windows 3.x. It morphed into "WordPad" in Windows 95 and later. > WordPad still exists. It won't write the Write (hah) format anymore, > but it can read it, and save in some variant of the RTF format. > > > Theoretically Microsoft Word is supposed to be able to read such files > > but I found that the version I was using (Word 2003) wouldn't. > > Curious. My install of Word 2003 can. Are you sure you installed > all the import/export filters? If you did a "Minimal" or "Custom" > install (instead of the mondo-huge "Full"), I don't think those are > all included by default.
I sit corrected! ;^) Word 2003 complains about the file saying in effect "this might be a virus but I have a converter that will convert it" and it does. I think the original reason I wrote the filter was because our friend didn't have Word and I didn't want to manually edit her 83 files. I'll see if Word can be called from the command line to do the converting. -Alex > > > Writing a filter in Python was trivial and I was able to convert the > > files to plain text. > > For future reference, the strings(1) command can be used to much the > same effect. > > > ... the file itself in ASCII, a series of bytes again in non-ASCII, > > followed by a repeat of some of the original ASCII. > > That sounds very similar to the MS Word .DOC format, and I bet > they're related. DOC files do not interleave the formatting with the > text, as (for example) HTML or Word Perfect did. Instead, all the > plain text is stored in one blob, and then the formatting information > is stored in a different blob. The formatting directives have > "pointers" to the position of the text they effect. > > The "repeat" you describe is not actually a repeat, but a follow-on > save. Word and friends work in an interesting fashion. You open the > file, and it loads the base text blob described above. You start > making your changes. Those changes go into an undo buffer. That undo > buffer is actually backstored on the disk in temporary files. > (That's why a directory containing Word files people are busy editing > accumulates lots of odd temp files until they close the original.) > > When you invoke "Save", the undo buffer -- essentially like a "diff" > -- gets tacked on to the end of the main file. This made saves fast > on slow computers already overburdened by Microsoft bloatware. Loads > were slower, of course, but the reasoning was that people care about > save speed more than load speed. As you can imagine, if there are > lots of saves, rebuilding the text is not so easy as running > strings(1) on it. > > In Word, if you turn off "Fast Saves", it writes out a full, unified > version of the text instead. This became the default at some point -- > I have no idea when. > > > But the interesting thing was that I couldn't easily find a Microsoft tool > > that > > understood the format which originated with Windows 95 or an earlier version > > of Windows. > > Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> WordPad > > My copy of Win XP Pro opens .WRI files automatically in WordPad. I > just double-click the file. > > WordPad is an optional component for Windows. Perhaps the computer > was installed with a "minimalist" attitude, so various optional tools > were not there when you needed them? > > -- Ben > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
