[PLUG-TALK] Word Perfect export to ascii?

Richard C. Steffens rsteff at comcast.net
Thu Dec 6 06:06:04 UTC 2012


On 12/05/2012 09:18 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> We have a supplier giving us a lot of printed documents composed
> in WordPerfect.  These look like typed letters, and all we care
> about is the text.  They claim they cannot export these as ASCII
> text, which seems unlikely.  We would like the ascii to feed
> into a database, rather than scanning the pages and storing
> images.
>
> Does word perfect export ascii text?

Yes. I use Word Perfect 11 running on Virtual Box. I suspect there won't 
be too many differences between version 11 and other versions for this 
issue.

File > Save as  opens a "Save As" dialog. One of the options, down 
toward the bottom of the dialog, is "File type". There are several text 
versions available:

ANSI (Windows) Delimited Text
ANSI (Windows) Generic Word Processor
ANSI Windows Text
ASCII (DOS) Delimited Text
ASCII (DOS) Generic Word Processor
ASCII DOS Text

Word Perfect can also export to various MS Word formats, which should be 
directly readable with Libre Office.

There are also several RTF options, and there is one called UNICODE 
Text. I saved a file I created with WP-11 as UNICODE Text, and then 
opened it with gedit on Ubuntu. Other than some divided page stuff I 
use, it converted my file to text. The tabs were a bit screwy, but 
otherwise it looked okay.

> If not, is there anything
> about a simple WPD file, filtered through Libre Office, that
> makes ascii output problematic?  I think we just need to teach
> them to use their own tool.

I have no problem opening a .wpd file with Libre Office. Formatting 
doesn't always follow nicely, but it sounds like you don't care about 
that. Tabs, bold, and italics work, but fancy stuff, like a divided 
page, don't convert. So, if you can't get your supplier to send you a 
.txt, you should be able to open the .wpd with Libre Office.

Of course, I assume that you've already tried that, so I may not 
understand the problem completely.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens




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