ChiWriter 3.17 and Converting to WordPerfect and Word
About ten years ago I obtained a Converter for ChiWriter documents. It converts to WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Nowadays that form opens most accurately not in an earlier WordPerfect, but in a recent Word for Windows. The little programme works very simply, on the DOS command line. Unfortunately it is not for v. 3.17, but for the scientific-mathematical CW.
I have managed to rewrite one of the files so that it will convert all Greek, including accents and diacriticals, without a slip. I have altered too the correspondences so that all the codes in SYMBOL are right. I have not worked on GOTHIC, but that would be quite easy to do. The extended characters still elude me. I think that that is the fault of the recipient file form not the converter, for extended characters are plainly present when the material is viewed in the DOS text editor.
Hebrew, Modern Hebrew and Arabic I and II cannot be made to go over. It does not seem to help to call Hebrew MATHI, for example, in either .BOX file: CONFIG.BOX works as well completely empty as full of Hebrew data, however labelled. The trouble is in the .EXE file, which is wrongly set up for 3.17. The time that I tried fiddling with that, I wrecked its functioning.
Some versions of Word and WordPerfect are more reliable than others. Some versions of WordPerfect make less of a fuss about what they cannot handle than Word 97, others make more.
I can get, as a Hellenist and Hebraist, the lion’s share of my documents to go over. For a deeper conversion (!) a real programmer needs to work on the question. However, here are my files, for what they are worth. They need to be put into a new sub-directory under Chiwrite, which must be called CW32WP.
These remarks were updated on 11.iii. 2002.
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