Convert old documents to MS Word???

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TheBossMan

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I'm looking for a program to convert a bunch of old documents to MS Word. We had a old program called ghostwriter that was dos based, recently started using MS Word for most documents.

The documents can open in MS Word as text documents, but it's got a bunch of formating information in the documents like this

Fp Z2146 Z F@ <- Instead of a letterhead

something that looks like a up arrow instead of tab & another symbol allmost looking like a star instead of enter/next line

and -BS for BOLD

There is a few other things, but I would like to have something that can convert the files / automatically change those characters with something I want it to do..

Any suggestions..
 
TheBossMan said:
I'm looking for a program to convert a bunch of old documents to MS Word. We had a old program called ghostwriter that was dos based, recently started using MS Word for most documents.

The documents can open in MS Word as text documents, but it's got a bunch of formating information in the documents like this

Fp Z2146 Z F@ <- Instead of a letterhead

something that looks like a up arrow instead of tab & another symbol allmost looking like a star instead of enter/next line

and -BS for BOLD

There is a few other things, but I would like to have something that can convert the files / automatically change those characters with something I want it to do..

Any suggestions..
Click to expand...

Have you tried OpenOffice?
 
Way back when I started my career in IT, at my first employment they used old Altos computers (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=456) with a text-based word processor on it.

The company then switched over to DOS-based PC's and WordPerfect 5.x...

The documents was transferred from the Altos PC's to the WordPerfect PC's quite easily.

What we did was to connect the two PC's parallel ports to each other. WordPerfect had a special program which would listen on the parallel port and "import' any text print jobs which was printed on the older system.

Worked quite well.

Maybe you can look at something similar? Print to a file, and import that file into OpenOffice or M$ Word? Because when printing to a file, the word processor will output the correct characters and others without leaving funny control characters.

Bold might be printed twice, but that's the least of your worries.

HTH

Ook
 
TheBossMan said:
I'm looking for a program to convert a bunch of old documents to MS Word. We had a old program called ghostwriter that was dos based, recently started using MS Word for most documents.

...... I would like to have something that can convert the files .....

Any suggestions..
Click to expand...

Hope I'm not misunderstanding you, but I use a program for work called PRIMO - it's a PDF converter, and works brilliantly well. If you don't need to amend any of your docs. after conversion, then a PDF format should be fine. Have a look at the site, d/load it & try it out on 1 or 2 docs.
If you must have them in MS Word, then that site may even have a converter but have not bothered looking...

www.primopdf.com/

Convert to PDF from any file you can print, including Microsoft® Word, Excel®, and PowerPoint® formats. More Information · Japanese. Nitro PDF Professional ...
 
I remember ghostwriter... was a great word processor program in its day!!

I think you will have a problem when importing to Word or any other new word processing package, especially with losing the formatting. As to converting to .pdf - I seriously doubt if it will work with ghostwriter (it is really old!).
 
If I remember correctly Ghostwriter was a South African innovation and used its own format for documents.
I doubt if you will find anything out there that will translate the documents correctly.

If it is worth your while (ie many valuable documents) you might have to employ the talents of a programmer to write a low level file translation utility for you.

Found this after a quick Google http://www.ghostfill.com/code/OriginsNS.htm
Maybe contact them to see if they have some sort of translation utility you could use.
 
I will try and print to text document or to pdf, but not sure if ghostwriter will actually see the pdf printer software cause it's a dos type program and it's really ancient as "sting" has allready mentioned. I just wanna get them into word or something and not needing to remove those funny characters afterwards. printing to PDF should be fine. I can allways keep them in PDF format as it's mostly for archive purposes. I could not get ghostwriter to work on Windows 2000 or upwards. We busy upgrading all the ancient pc's that was still running Win95 and Win98 to WinXP or Win7.

Printing them into a more modern format sounds like the best solution.
 
Open Office is your solution. Install it... convert all your docs... then you can uninstall it if you want.
 
TheBossMan said:
I will try and print to text document or to pdf, but not sure if ghostwriter will actually see the pdf printer software cause it's a dos type program and it's really ancient as "sting" has allready mentioned. I just wanna get them into word or something and not needing to remove those funny characters afterwards. printing to PDF should be fine. I can allways keep them in PDF format as it's mostly for archive purposes. I could not get ghostwriter to work on Windows 2000 or upwards. We busy upgrading all the ancient pc's that was still running Win95 and Win98 to WinXP or Win7.

Printing them into a more modern format sounds like the best solution.
Click to expand...

Install FreeDOS under VirtualBox on a PC and then install Ghostwriter. Thay way you have a virtualised environment that you can use to access the documents.
 
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