Reading old MacWrite documents?

jfruh

Hi all-



Let's get really old school for a minute: I recently discovered a trove of old documents I wrote on my very first Mac in the early 1990s. Back then, my lightweight word processor of choice was MacWrite. None of the my currently available word processors -- MS Word X, AppleWorks 6, TextEdit, BBEdit -- can open these files (I just see gibberish if I try). I do have a copy of MacWrite 4.6, but it crashes when I attempt to launch it in Classic. Anyone have any ideas on how I can open these documents? I'm running OS X 10.2.6, and the OS used by classic is 9.2.2.



jf

voxapps

Try MacLinkPlus by DataViz. It can handle reading a boatload of Mac and Windows/DOS formats including MacWrite II and MacWrite Pro 1.0 and 1.5. You can read about it at DataViz Web site

drboar

Word Perfect 3.5 for Macintosh

Free and and handles MS Word MacWrite (II) WriteNow

Can usually be downloaded at http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~jdburto/wpmac35e.html

but the server seem to have a hit a snag now.



A wicked fast WP for old power macs. On a 7200/90 its scrolling is faster than Microsoft Word on any Mac south of 1 GHz, I think.



It works in classic 9.2.2

lemon

With BBedit you should see some jibberish. But if you look through the jibberish your text should be in there. If you really want your text you should be able to find it in there. You just need to dig through all the formatting crap. It shouldn't be to hard, just a pain.



If you want to post one of the MacWrite files I could try to write a little app to strip out the extra crap. I just don't have a MacWrite file to see what to strip-out. No promises but I could give it a whirl.