Thinking about it further:
Use a program like notepad or any simple text editor, or even better, a
binary editor like hexedit to look at the .prn files directly.
If most of the text you want to keep is visible in relatively large
intact chunks, you can copy the whole file to a temporary file (leave
the original alone!) and just chop out all the control stuff or copy and
paste all the good stuff to a new file, whichever is easier. This is a
labor of love and will lose all the formatting, but at least you'll have
the text.
If you're familiar with or want to learn a programming language that is
good at text processing such as awk or perl, you might be able to
automate the process - especially if you have a lot of files to
recover. The base languages (especially awk) are easy enough to use.
The only challenging part is getting used to using simple regular
expressions. These are the way you specify what to find and replace.
It might take a bit of effort to get used to them, but it's well worth
it because many modern products, including OOo, support their use and
you can do amazing things to text with just a short expression typed in
a few seconds once you get the hang of it (God bless the undo key while
you're figuring it out.)
If you define a few good styles in OOo, putting the formatting back in
to the recovered text might not be so bad.
Joe
Joe wrote:
the "text" files should be doable. The worst case would be having to
do a lot of search and replace all's for embedded format codes. .prn
files are a different story.
A .prn file is printed output saved to disk. It's already been
translated from something usable by a program into the codes needed to
display it on a specific printer. It may have whole fonts embedded in
it, etc.
So, if you don't have the application files that were used to generate
the .prn files (in which case, you would just work on getting them
into OOo), probably the next best option would be to actually print
them in the best quality possible (good paper, etc.) and then run them
through a high quality scanner and really good OCR software. This
would turn them back into files a program like OOo could work with.
The scanner and OCR software have to be good so what you get out bears
as much resemblance as possible to what you put in. I have cheap
versions of both and sometimes scans come out perfect, but often
they're bad enough that retyping would be faster than correcting.
Things like multiple columns of text, different sized fonts, or
interspersed graphics on a page tend to really whack out simple OCR
programs.
Try it yourself first. Scanners can be had very inexpensively and
usually come with some OCR software. The total cost is probably less
than one hour of a consultant's time.
If the data is worth enough - and especially if you need to modify it,
then getting a local desktop publishing consultant, etc. with access
to good equipment might be worth it.
Joe
Mac McClain wrote:
I have a very old computer that I continue to use but would like to
move some of my work to my newer computer. I have moved a few of the
spreadsheets (with mixed success) and would like to move some of the
text files. I am running Windows XP Home and OOo 2.0.2 (I think). I
have some DOS print files (.prn) that are normally printed on an
Epson printer so they have imbedded escape characters to force the
printer to hi-lite some words plus forced page ejects. How do I get
these characters translated in OOo Writer to get the Lexmark Z715 to
do the same thing? Is this even possible or should I just plan on
keeping my old gear forever? Thanks for any words of wisdom you all
can provide.
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