That is really unfortunate. In Windows/DOS, we have problems with unrecognizable characters, and characters that are part of the formatting, but not so much the difficulties you are talking about--although at least one program (the old Ashton-Tate solution known as Framework) DID have quite a mess of confusing characters in it, and scattered throughout in some sort of order, so I'm not sure if this is the same thing you mean. It is really frustrating to realize that if you had written everything by hand, you might be better off than with a computer that stores your information....I picked up some of my old grad school notes (1970's), and they were quite readable--because they were typed and annotated on PAPER. This is something that has to be fixed for the future. That's why I said that it's important that there be a single standard, and that the various regulatory authorities demand that it be so (think if we had multiple voltages and amperages, and frequencies in our electrical systems, and if DC current was used by some, AC by others--in the same country...the preservation of data is at least as important.).
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 12:35 AM, laurent alonso <laurent.alo...@inria.fr>wrote: > Hello Steven, > > Le 26 nov. 2012 à 19:43, Steven Bradley a écrit : > > > I totally agree with all this--but in a pinch, as everyone I'm sure > knows, > > one can open a document (most of them at least), and go back and "decode" > > it with a text processor like Notepad or Notepad++; come to think of it, > > I'm actually surprised that Sourceforge doesn't offer a converter for all > > those old documents--not to mention all the documents written on Apple > > II's, etc. All of us have them. I have many documents written in > Wordstar, > > Wordperfect, and so on. > > As I am trying to do something similar on Sourceforge, for many > archaic mac > classic documents (you can look for libmwaw ) , this is not so simple : > > - maybe 1/3 of formats, that I see, do not store the text continuously but > by blocks > in order to be more efficient : for instance, they can cut the text in > block > which have between 128 and 256 characters and then stores block 3, block > 1, block 2. > Thus when you add some characters, they only need to update a small block > (and sometimes split a block of 256 in two blocks ) : this includes Word > v3-5, > FullWrite, MacWritePro... This also means that if you read the file > continuously > you will read many junk part of the files which contains not relevant > text. > > - I have 3 formats which compress text data before storing them on the > disk : this includes MacWrite, MindWrite, HanMac Word ( a format which > I am studying actually, ...) ; FullWrite also stores a space character > with the > ascii code 0 (which means that notepad will not retrieve any space > characters ) > > - after on Mac Classic, you can have as many fonts as you want and each > can have > a different encoding ; this means that you must at least retrieve the > fonts name, > if you want to retrieve the good character ( this also means that as I > found/code only > a subset of the fonts encoding, I can only retrieve roman text ). > > -- > Amicalement, > Laurent. > > > > -- Steven C. (Steve) Bradley CA Dept of Real Estate, Lic. #00869762 619-316-8781 Direct 619-442-8833 XT 119 Office See my websites: Real Estate and Finance http://realestateandfinancialwisdom.blogspot.com Relationship with God: http://truevoiceofthefather.blogspot.com/ <http://realestateandfinancialwisdom.blogspot.com/> "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." --Margaret Thatcher "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." - Samuel Johnson -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
