Dear people, Some of you may remember a couple of months ago, I was asking on the list if there was a way of converting SAM wordprocessor files to some sort of PC-compatible format. Basically, my problem was that I had 80 or so WordMaster files (which together make up half a book about Pulp), and I wanted to get them over to my elderly 486 without losing any of the formatting. I'm posting my findings in case anyone ever needs to do anything similar (or possibly point out a far easier way of doing it). The most straightforward technique that I could find was basically to use WordMaster's search/replace function to convert the files to HTML SAM-side, then use Edwin's excellent SAM Diskimage thingy to load them on to the PC. >From there, of course, I could load the HTML files into Word and save them in any format I wanted with all the bold, italics etc preserved. So the main work was to get the WordMaster files into HTML. It's a pretty straightforward process (albeit labourious if you've got 80 files to do!), and I guess most of the people here will know the basic HTML tags, so the following is probably superfluous, but here anyway are some pointers... Obviously it doesn't have to be perfect, bug-free HTML - the only concern should be for the resultant text to look more or less as it would if you printed it out from the SAM. You need to put a <html> tag at the start of the document, and from thereon it's all straigtforward: inv-I (for italics) should be replaced with <i>; inv-i should be replaced with </i>; inv-E (for bold) with <strong>; inv-e with </strong>; the newline (pointy-down arrow - to input this into the search/replace box you need to press F9 then SHIFT+RETURN) character with <br> or <p> according to whether it's a new line (for which you need <br>) or a new paragraph (for which you need <p>); the raised text/superscript character with <sup>; the lowered text/subscript character with <sub>; and so on and so on. Basically keep going until all of the WordMaster control characters have been replaced with HTML tags. The result should be saved as FILENAME.htm, and then you should be able to load it into your PC with Edwin's program, resulting in something fairly close to what you started with on the SAM. Personally I found it helpful to load the HTML files into Word and then save them as Word v2.0 files, because doing that stripped away a lot of the superfluous formatting crap that you get when you convert HTML into, say, a Word 97 file or RTF. And with that, I'm off. It's been an interesting return to the list (most pleased to have dropped in just when the Samsboss/Ritman/Broughton intrigue was being cleared up), but now it's time to sub down once more. Bye bye everybody! Mark _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
