On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Edward Mendelson <e...@columbia.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Recently I was asked to help someone convert hundreds of WPMac files that
> include Japanese Kanji, files that were created on old Macs that had the
> Japanese Language Kits installed.
>
> It seems - I could be wrong - that libwpd doesn't convert the characters in
> those files. The method I found for converting them was a bit roundabout:
> ...
Use a PowerPC Mac that runs OS 10.4 and "Classic" with the Japanese Language
> Kit installed. Open the WPMac files in WPMac in Classic. Copy the contents
> of the file to the clipboard. Paste the contents of the file from the
> Clipboard into OS X's TextEdit or any other unicode-aware Mac application.
> Save the resulting file as an RTF or DOC file. The resulting file opens
> correctly in LibreOffice, Pages, Word, etc.
>
> This method obviously requires obsolete hardware and software. I would
> guess that it would require an enormous amount of effort to support
> double-byte CJK and other WorldScript-based scripts in libwpd, and that the
> potential need for it is far too small to justify the effort. But is this
> something that might someday be possible in the future?
>
Actually, it's not really that difficult. Unless Japanese is dramatically
different from what we've seen so far, all we should need to make this
conversion work is a table mapping from WordPerfect extended characters to
their unicode equivalents. Over the years we've expanded support for
languages from only plain latin to relatively obscure ones like Tibetan
courtesy of mappings submitted by various people.
If you don't have the expertise to create such a mapping yourself, we could
probably derive one from (1) a WP document containing all the characters in
a Japanese script and (2) one converted to RTF/DOC. If you're interested in
producing something like this, let us know!
--
William Lachance
wrl...@gmail.com
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