Short story : I was forced to transfer a lot of files from Wordperfect
4.2 DOS on to a Windows XP machine I bought a very old copy of
Wordperfect 7 it read about 50% of the 4.2 files but quite a lot it said
were corrupted.
Wordperfect 7 was written for Windows 3.1 (That might have been part of
the problem).
I installed Openoffice.org Writer later expecting it to be able to read
the Wordperfect 7 files (which it did) but to my surprise it read the
the 4.2 files perfectly.
If you like a saga read on
My mother has used Wordperfect 4.2 DOS since the 80's to do Italian
translations.
I had been pleading with her to use my computer for several years prior
but she refused. It was only when her electric typewriter blew up that
she reluctantly used my old computer with Wordperfect 4.2.
My dot matrix printer and DOS machine served her well. I tried to
interest her in Windows but nothing doing.
As time went on I started to worry about what would happen if the
hardware would die. I had a backup DOS computer WP 4.2 loaded.
Anyway the day finally came that we could no longer get printer ribbons
for the dot matrix and the printer started to behave erratically . Panic
ensued. I had a bubble jet printer no way could I get a dos driver to
run it. My copy of Wordperfect 4.2 came on 5.25 inch disks.
I gave her my computer. Used Fastlynx (Fastlynx comes with dos version
slave) connect the two machines and downloaded her hundreds of files on
to the new computer.
Now to read the word files MSWord 2000 would not touch them. I went to
a software house and they found an old dust covered Windows 3.1 copy of
Corel Suite with Wordperfect 7 on it in their warehouse.
Wordperfect 7 it read about 50% of the 4.2 files but quite a lot it said
were corrupted and would not open. The files that it did open had
formating errors (ie Page 1 was A4 but page 2 was Foolscap) Wordperfect
7 was written for Windows 3.1 I was running it on XP (That might have
been part of the problem).
However we got enough of the files back that we could keep going.
My mother is in her 80's and the I think it was important to her to keep
doing the odd job to keep her mind active.
She really struggled with the mouse a track ball or Logitec marble mouse
made life a lot easier.
When I discovered Openoffice.org I installed it on my home machines and
I was very happy with it. When I saw I could get an Italian Language
version of Openoffice with an Italian language spelling dictionary I
downloaded it and installed it on my mother's machine.
It read the Wordperfect 7 files perfectly but to my great surprise it
read the DOS Wordperfect 4.2 files perfectly underlines and all.
(Wordperfect 4.2 files do not even have extensions to tell you what type
of file it is eg .doc, .wpd, .txt)
Thank you Openoffice.org Writer
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