I've been pretty religious over the years about migrating archived materials and the needed software to new media as it comes along, with only one major misfire on a set of directories that converted without their content. But for some of it, it would be a big job to get, e.g., CP/M emulation running to run some really old apps. And to get flawless copies of my years of WordPerfect client files would require reinstalling Windows 95 and Windows XP, since the WPD filters for FOSS software aren't there yet for complex documents. On the other hand, until I retired and could stop using Windoze, it was really fun to run WordStar 3.x for DOS on a much more souped-up machine than it was designed for. Actions happen so incredibly fast as to be instantaneous for practical purposes.
Somewhere I've got a copy of WordStar 7 archived, which caused me to get in a lot of trouble with my wife when I described my first impression of it as being like running into an old girlfriend wearing new undies. But for the most part, WordPerfect's conversion filters for WordStar files work pretty well, although they don't convert footnotes to WordPerfect footnotes, since the program I used for footnotes in WordStar files was an external procesor dependent on custom markup. So I had to write a script for post-processing them after conversion. WordPerfect support for OpenDocument is supposed to be out later this year, so I may have a go at converting my WPD archives to ODT. We'll have to see what the quality of the conversion filters will be. But I don't have a lot of confidence that ODT is going to be stable very long. There's simply too much pressure flowing internationally for convergence of ODF and Microsoft's XML file formats. On your problem with Brother files, I haven't tried any of them, but there is a conversion tool here that claims to be able to do it. < http://www.file-convert.com/ff.htm>. Free unlimited trial download but it automagically inserts spelling errors. They also have an online service that has Brother listed as a conversion source type. See also < http://www.acii.com/dvlpref.htm#TC00016>, which seems to be a development library for the same conversion engine. Not clear whether it's free for private use. Other links to look at: < http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/search.r?filter=domain-text-processing> (free REBOL script) <http://www.luxsoft.demon.co.uk/lux/bconv-k.html> <http://www.comgen.co.uk/WordProcessingConversion.htm>
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