I've read the history of WriteNow on Wiki, and lots of input on this site. Most of it incomprehensible to me. Is there a way of opening my old WriteNow docs and saving them to a different word processor? I read about downloading the app here, but I have a system 10 Mac and it seems these downloads are only available for up to system 9. Most of my poetry and early writing is in WriteNow format, and I really need to get to it somehow. Thanks.
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2013, March 8 - 8:21pm
#1
WriteNow docs - saving them to different word processor format
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2013, March 9 - 12:24am
#2
The WriteNow 4.0 archived on MG can save files to a MS-Word RTF file format.
The RTF file can be transferred to OSX and can be opened with Word in OSX.
To open WriteNow files without a "Classic" Mac, you will need either a emulator like SheepShaver on your OSX host, or a Mac capable of running "Classic" apps with OSX 10.4 Tiger (or lower) on PPC hardware.
If you want to set up SheepShaver or BasiliskII for OSX, please read here:
http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/sheepshaver_mac_os_x_setup
http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basiliskii_osx_setup
Guest Mac systems with MacOS 7.5 or higher can easily exchange files with the host system via a virtual "Unix" drive.
If you can upload your poetry in .sit containers to Ubuntu1 or else, someone here might be willing to convert it to Word or something else suitable, I suppose.
2013, March 9 - 2:26am
#3
As 24bit says. Saving your WriteNow documents to Rich Text (RTF) if you get WriteNow running again is the best solution. As just about all text editing programs support RTF, even the default text editor that comes with Mac OS X can open RTF formatted text.
Yet, from your post I get the impression that setting up an emulator, installing old OS's onto it and learning how to use it, will be a steep learning curve for you. I could be wrong tho' (I often am).
What I would do before resorting to hard work, is install the "TextWrangler" text editor onto your current Mac. Its a free software that can open just about any file you throw at it.
Drag one of your WriteNow documents onto TextWrangler's icon and let it open it up. You will likely see some garbage characters in the opened document. But you should also see all of the text that you have entered into the document as plain text. This you can select and copy and paste into a word processing program of your choice. Or you can select and delete the garbage characters you see and save the text as is, using TextWrangler to view and edit it further with.
Note: TextWrangler from the above link's main DL page will only run on the latest Macs and Mac OS's. If your Mac is older and not running the latest OS's (10.6.8 or newer), older versions that will run on 10.4 or newer are available on their updates page (version 3.1 at bottom of page). If your Mac OS is even older than 10.4, ask back here, I have some earlier versions of TextWrangler archived.
HTH
2013, March 9 - 12:03pm
#4
Good thought, MikeTomTom!
If phyllis is happy with the plain ASCII part of his work and styles and formatting are no issue, TextWrangler is just perfect.
Depending on the type of his documents, cutting out the "garbage" characters may become wearisome though.
IIRC WriteNow´s "Word RTF export" did enshrine most of the originals nature, but it always depends...
Setting up an emulator may be time consuming too, when starting from scratch.