On 4/19/2011 9:16 AM, William Lachance wrote: > On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Edward Mendelson <e...@columbia.edu > <mailto: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 <mailto:wrl...@gmail.com>
I created a WPMac 3.5e file with a few lines of Japanese kanji. The text is nonsense - I simply typed in random characters because I know about ten words of Japanese and don't know how to type them. But it should give you an idea of how kanji is stored in WPMac files. The file is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/271144/Kanji.wpmac I'm not expert enough in the WPMac file format to learn anything from it, but perhaps it may be useful to someone who knows a lot more than I do. When I open it in Writer, it's blank except for a single letter "t". Edward Mendelson Contributing Editor PC Magazine ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Benefiting from Server Virtualization: Beyond Initial Workload Consolidation -- Increasing the use of server virtualization is a top priority.Virtualization can reduce costs, simplify management, and improve application availability and disaster protection. Learn more about boosting the value of server virtualization. http://p.sf.net/sfu/vmware-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Libwpd-devel mailing list Libwpd-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/libwpd-devel
