Archive WordPerfect?

May 24, 2008 5:06 PM

Is there a program that will help to convert a batch (10 to 100) of WordPerfect files into TXT or RTF or DOC format so that they can then be archived into a text management program?

Most text management programs (think TreePad or Zoot or about 20 others) will handle TXT or DOC files but choke when they encounter a WPD file. Those files can be converted one by one, but I would like to be able to convert a large number at one time. Is there something out there that will do this?

posted by yclipse to computers & internet (5 comments total)

PYODConverter and OpenOffice? (found via)
posted by scruss at 5:30 PM on May 24, 2008

OpenOffice almost perfectly fits the bill. In your operating system, set it as the default application for WordPerfect files. In OpenOffice, set .doc as the default file type to which to save.

Then select all the WordPerfect files you want to convert and open them in OpenOffice. I don't think you can get around needing to do File > Save As > Yes for each individual file, but if you're talking about a batch of 100 files, that won't take you more than ten or fifteen minutes.
posted by gum at 6:40 PM on May 24, 2008

Here is a script to make PYODConverter convert every file in a directory to pdf. You can change pdf to whatever file type you want.
posted by PueExMachina at 7:07 PM on May 24, 2008

If you have a free choice of archival formats, RTF is by far the best of those you've listed. It's been supported by everything for forever, does a pretty good job of preserving formatting, and is easy to extract text from.
posted by flabdablet at 8:57 PM on May 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you still have access to the WordPerfect program (via DOSBox or VM or whatever), I believe it included a converter program that would do batch TXT->WPD->TXT type conversions. I'm thinking 5.1 for DOS included it.

And seconding RTF as the format of choice, but only if the formatting means anything to you. Otherwise, TXT is the universal format; it's fast, small, and readable by darn near everything.
posted by eafarris at 6:35 PM on May 25, 2008