Hi Mike, a little research reveals the following. It appears to be a specialist Word Processing document but should open up in a basic text editor - as you said with additional formatting characters. I don't think it is a database, perhaps just a table of data.
Ask the person to sent it again as an exported text file to save you cleaning
it up. Otherwise there are some text scrubbing utilities that are available to
clean up the rubbish.
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The MDH file type is primarily associated with 'Madhyam' by Balendu Sharma
Dadhich. Files created in Madhyam have '.mdh' extension. However, they can be
opened in Notepad or any other word processor very easily and modified.
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Madhyam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Madhyam is a Devanagari word processor that complies with the Inscript
Devanagari Text Input Standard authenticated by the Government of India, the
Unicode Consortium and Bureau of Indian Standards. It allows typing text in
Indian languages, i.e. Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali and Konkani.
Developed by Balendu Sharma Dadhich, it can be used for creating, opening,
saving and modifying text files and taking print-outs. The software also allows
sending email and surfing Hindi websites. Apart from Inscript (sometimes called
'Phonetic') keyboard, it also supports traditional Remington keyboard layout.
The latest version of Madhyam does not support Unicode and RTF like full
formatting, but future versions of Madhyam might support them. The software has
been created with the sole purpose of promoting use of Hindi and other Indian
languages in the world of computing.
Also notable is the OpenOffice Hindi project, which aims on translating the
open source suite into Hindi.
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Regards,
Eugene
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On 11/07/2011, at 9:28 AM, Mike Murray wrote: > > Hi muggers > > We've downloaded some files from an obscure UK university lecturer who refers > to them as databases. They may be quite old (early 2000s). > > The file extension is .mdh. I can open with Textedit and can see that there > is text in there (mixed up with the usual characters that describe some sort > of formatting) but can't make sense of the layout. Filemaker Pro will also > open it but just arrays all the characters across 21 fields for 2000 records, > with no logic. > > Anyone know what will open a .mdh file? Google is silent (although there is > an obscure reference to a Hindi Word Processor...) > > Cheers > Mike > > > > > Mike Murray and Lesley Silvester > TimeTrackers > East Fremantle > Western Australia > > Tel 08 9339 8078 > Fax 08 9339 0519 > > British and Australian genealogical and historical research, > education, publishing and film-making > > www.timetrackers.com.au > > > > > > -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- > Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> > Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> > Unsubscribe - <mailto:[email protected]> >
