I’ve googled and found a converter for WinPC, but not one for Mac. I’m hoping that someone on here has come up against this problem on here (I wrote some scenes on Lotus Writer Pro at some stage in the mid 2000s and I have a PRESSING NEED to see if they were ANY GOOD).
I have NeoOffice, which has made a passable ####¶77343fhjHFKJHSKJ@@@@@@ stab at it, but I don’t want to spend hours cleaning / copying and pasting the odd snippet of MAGNIFICENT PROSE.
Because actually writing them again will take less time than all this faffing about on the intertron. And that defeats the object of NEVER ACTUALLY FINISHING or GETTING PUBLISHED.
Capitals are the new BLACK. It’s true. I read it in books.
I’ve rescued many of my old files (WriteNow, etc.) with TextWrangler, which is free from Bare Bones Software. It displays the ASCII characters along with gizmos you can edit out. The only stuff it won’t recover are files that DiskDoubler auto-compressed and never expanded, alas. Remember the days when storage was expensive and disk drives very limited? barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
Any software that has a command ‘Zap Gremlins’ has to be worth a shot - alas it doesn’t really do a better job of displaying the contents than NeoOffice. With various search and replaces I have a very rough start, and I can at least read what I wrote. I had, in fact, forgotten the direction I was going with that character at the time, so it has been moderately useful as a time-wasting exercise.
NeoOffice would have been my best suggestion for salvaging old word processor formats on the Mac, so if that isn’t working and a simple gremlin zapper isn’t, it might not be an easy task. You might contact a friend with a PC and see if they can use this converter for you.
There are some more expensive options. You could buy Parallels, and Windows, and install a virtual PC on your Mac on which you could then install your WinPCC converter.
Or you could just buy a cheap PC.
Or you could research and buy a really expensive PC if you really want to waste time and money. To waste or the other is frivolous, but to waste both is procrastination nirvana.
A free method would be to see if your WinPC solution works using WINE.
Another thing I forgot about, if the format basically embedded formatting binary data around actual strings, where the strings are the text you typed in, you could try using the ‘strings’ command line too. That’s exactly what it is for, stripping out all of the garbage and saving only the printable stuff (usually text).
That greater-than sign in the middle causes all of ‘strings’ output to be stored into the text file on the right. This file needn’t exist, it will be created when you press return. In fact, it’s best to use a new file on the right, because the greater-than sign will destroy whatever currently exists there by that filename. Use two, like ‘>>’, instead to append to the named file.
This will probably still be a mess. Strings doesn’t make any attempt to find paragraphs and fix line endings, but least the file won’t look like a font explosion. Just more like the fabled 1e23rd monkey that typed Shakespearian verse (if you are lucky).