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Hello, good people,
I just realized that I did not spam for long time this list with one of
those e-mails that say a lot of stuff, but nobody cares about them. I am
doing so now partly for those who would like to have some information on
WP Mac 1.x file format searchable by google.
Concerning the WP Mac 1.x support, the cvs libwpd has an initial support
for this file format. Some documents WP Mac 1.x documents can be
detected as "Unknown file format". I would beg you to send me this kind
of documents, so that I can examine them and correct the function sizes
and/or implement new features.
The people who are to be thanked for this support are mainly our own
Smokey Ardisson and Eric Brachard, co-lead of OpenOffice.org porting
project. Eric has the kindness to allocate me, for purposes of libwpd
development, a Mac mini that was donated to the porting project by
Apple. Smokey helped a great deal with the WP 3.x file format and also
was looking without stopping for 2.x and 1.x specifications. What he got
for 1.x are some documents and a working version of WP Mac 1.0.5.
So, now something more about the file-format:
1) It is similar to WP 4.x in the fact that it has no header whatever,
just a plain text with WP functions inserted.
2) The similarity with WP 4.x is quite big. A function that has certain
purpose in WP 4.x will have the same purpose in WP Mac 1.x, although the
function length or the function structure is not the same.
3) Lengths and positions are typically in 2 byte (unsigned?) big endian
integers. The units are points (72 pts = 1 inch). Example: 00 48 means 1
inch.
4) The variable length functions have following structure:
<function code> 1 byte
{size of data} 32 bit unsigned integer
<data> x size of data
{size of data}
<function code>
5) When reverse-engineering the function codes, it is wise to be
inspired by both WP42 and WP3 file formats. Certain functions follow
closely the WP42 specifications (with modification that the positions
are in 16-bit points instead of in 8-bit "columns"), certain functions
follow the WP3 logic (like the Tab Set is containing condensed tab
tables that follow the logic of WP3 Set Tabs function).
I also met quite a big problem concening the font information. The
file-format is storing the font information in 16-bit number
corresponding to Mac fontID. If someone of you know about the way to get
unambiguosly the font name from fontID, I will not refuse such
information. OTOH, a table mapping 0xffff+1 numbers to strings would
bloat a bit libwpd. But, if there is a way to place the fontIDs into
groups and map the groups each one to one font that is representative of
the group, I wouldn't be so difficult to get convinced to try to
implement it :-)
Having said this, it looks like 0.8.7 will probably support to a certain
extent _ALL_ WordPerfect file-formats on this planet. Did WP 1 for dos
exist?
Cheers
Fridrich
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