what would you use to open old wordperfect documents?

thegeldingthegelding
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
we have some old medical papers from 1995 that we want to make into PDFs (we are converting all our published papers)...so far it is going fine, except that we have 4 documents that seem to be wordperfect files from long ago and nothing we have opens them...any thoughts??



thanks g

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    chinneychinney Posts: 1,019member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by thegelding

    we have some old medical papers from 1995 that we want to make into PDFs (we are converting all our published papers)...so far it is going fine, except that we have 4 documents that seem to be wordperfect files from long ago and nothing we have opens them...any thoughts??



    thanks g



    I have no idea - but that has never stopped me from posting before - so let me just say that if you obtained a copy of WordPerfect for Mac (still available in a few places as far as I know, though no longer being developed) and ran it on Classic then I would imagine that you might be able to open the documents.



    Description here includes the following comments:



    Quote:

    Corel WordPerfect 3.5 for Macintosh easily converts many popular document types including Microsoft® Word versions 4, 5, and 6, RTF (Rich Text Format) and Corel WordPerfect 7 for Windows® 95. A non-WordPerfect document can be opened directly from the desktop into WordPerfect via support for Macintosh Easy Open. Additional document types can be converted through support for XTND and MacLink Plus conversion filters.



    I liked working on WordPerfect way back when. I wish that they, and not MS, had won the word processing wars. I just felt that I had more control over my document.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    Did you try text edit? I know it's a very versatile app, though I've never tried to open a wordperfect doc before. \
  • Reply 3 of 9
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    PM me.



    i still have the app., i'll mail it to you. as far as i'm concerned it's abandonware at this point.
  • Reply 4 of 9
    drboardrboar Posts: 477member
    As I recall Word 5.1 could open WP and also Word 6 (at least after adding some filters). So look around for any old IIci to 6100 generation and they may have those kind of word processors on them.



    With my published papers I wanted to preserve the layout of the publications as opposed to the submitted manuscripts. So I scanned the publications and then pasted one page image per page in a word document that only contained several page breaks and then saved the whole thing as a PDF.



    The only disadvantage is that as these PDFs does not contain any text, but only images of text they become a bit bigger. They are around 800k each and then look better than a out of a copy machine but not as good as reprint.
  • Reply 5 of 9
    jesperasjesperas Posts: 524member
    MacLink Plus from DataViz.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    gabidgabid Posts: 477member
    Just download WordPerfect. Doesn't work for every file I've tried, and copying and pasting from Classic to Word in X doesn't always work (sometimes it copies as a picture file), but, more often that not, it seems to work. You can always save as RTF under WordPerfect then open in X.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    keshkesh Posts: 621member
    Yeah, Corel made the old version of Wordperfect for Mac freely available a few years ago. Very cool.
  • Reply 8 of 9
    regreg Posts: 832member
    We had the same problem with some old school files. MacLink plus is what we had to use to convert them over.



    reg
  • Reply 9 of 9
    thegeldingthegelding Posts: 3,230member
    thanks all...WP 3.5 enhanced did the trick...opened in OS9...saved as RTF and took over to Word in OS X...then saved as PDF...all is good...





    g
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