I have a bunch of text files from writing that I did in a copy of DOS software called WordPublisher from 1992. When I open them in TextEdit or Sublime on a Mac, there are a bunch of special characters, some of the readable text, and then more special characters. The software just doesn't exist anywhere in any format now. Anyone know how I can recover the full text from a file like that?

remove non-ASCII characters?

@asgs To me it looks like it was a zipped file or something because some of the content is missing or maybe encoded into other characters. But if you're saying that couldn't be the case and that this is the natural state of the file, I guess the content is hosed. :(

Did Microsoft provide a way to import this format? If I made a word processor and I wanted to get rid of other word processors I would. Maybe there is an older copy of Word that will import this?

Just from memory: Try LibreOffice.

I think they had at least an library for that *sometime*...

@Demolishun Microsoft suddenly became a non-option for me as the license expired and I'm not paying for Office 365 just to convert files. Ugh. Maybe I can get it and then cancel it on trial or something.

What happens when you use cat or nano or vim?

sudo cat /pathToFileHere

Some sort of headers, it probably tells you how to read the files. Try looking for the format spec

Try different encoding options in a reader like notepad++ or sublime.

@jfuginay don't forget to chmod 777 and chown root:root

@stackodev you might want to look at a library that does the filtering/conversion for you.
It reminds me of those legacy proprietary file formats from hard&software vendors from ages ago.

Its Microsoft I guess? Most likely there is something out there that can convert it to RTF or something.

Not sure If pandoc supports it.

Could be an wordpad file, but what file extension is it, dos and windows usually identify format by the extension, not necessarily by anything inside the file.

i read “Courier Pitch” as Courier Bitch,
which in turn reminded me of “Times New Bastard” and oh my god

someone actually made it
https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang...

the top of the file seems to be some utf-8 compliant binary metadata headers, most likely in a custom protocol of the original software. those are lost forever.
But the content of the file seem so be simple: filter out the header lines and then the non-ascii chars, and reformat the text in modern software.

Some things I can infer from the header:
- Binary block divisor seems to be å+linebreak
- Unenecoded literal delimiters are dual bottom-pointing ^
- The protocol name is "WPC"
- Stiling superblocks are delimited by the longest rows

@jfuginay Seems to be the same using that command as opening the file in Sublime.

If nothing helps im sure gpt can extract some

@dontbeevil imagine paying for some crappy text processor.

If all of your text is there and not encoded in anyway and just interspersed with weird characters then I’d just use chatGPT to remove them. Or if you know what the random characters mean, tell chatGPT and get it to apply the meaning by giving it an example.

@dontbeevil

I have no clue what you're talking about.

Word Publisher should be Microsoft.

Yeah, MS DOS Word existed.

Hence my comment regarding Libreoffice.

Rest of the content will be probably formatting and other things. MS publisher exists till today afaik.

... While Office OpenXML exists nowadays, its a 6000 plus page monster which - and that is an pretty obvious point - was critized for not being implementable.

@dontbeevil I can no longer find even a reference to WordPublisher in any search. It was DOS “shareware” written by a small company (not Microsoft at all) that came to me in the mail on a 5 1/4” floppy back in the late 80s/early 90s. I remember using it for a degree of WYSIWYG formatting to write school papers and such, which is what I’m trying to resurrect. There’s probably no hope of getting it restored completely. Very strange format that seems to truncate or obfuscate the actual content of each file.

@dontbeevil this isn't email...

Okay, so it is not Microsoft Publisher.

Never heard of Word Publisher, Wikipedia doesn't list it, too (and they list DOS only software)

What does the file command say about the file?

$ file QUOTES

I looked at the current file support of Word and Word Perfect. Neither support wpc files. I didn't check libre office. Kind of doubting it would support it either. I have to wonder if this is a format that is lost to time. I did search github out of pure hopium and it didn't return anything there that was useful.

I have reverse engineered image formats before. One even had RLE encoding in it.

Try an online converter tool to convert to RTF then open with Word or something

https://cloudconvert.com/wps-to-rtf

Try the wps or wpd format?

Worth a shot.

https://document.online-convert.com/...

DOS emulator

@retoor im not even sure how i ended up in this thread... your comment from 3 weeks ago made my brain smile... ive had to explain that chmod 777 crap to so many people that it's genuinely concerning to the fate of humanity. Part of me just wants to write a program to identify, hack, and continuously remove from the internet, anyone who's posted chmod 777 as a solution anywhere online.

The worst part is... im nearly certain I could do it, not get caught, while removing ovet 90% of them.

Is this your card?
...wait, no.
Is this your software?
https://elisoftware.org/w/..._(PC,_3_1/2%22_Disk)_Spinnaker_-_1989_USA,_Canada_Release

EDIT: you know it's gonna be a great day when dR can't handle a link because punctuation. here's a shortened one. http://bit.ly/god-fucking-dammit-de...

I didn't get the edit in in time, but this suite has the word processor in it. https://winworldpc.com/product/...

How long until I get banned for this link, I wonder?

@Parzi Yes, that was the exact software I used. Core memories unlocked of our “computer room” at home in the late 80s and early 90s. Wish I could find the actual .exe and such to try to run it on an emulator. Lost to history, I’m afraid.

@stackodev I *just* sent a link to floppy images. It's on WinWorld. Go run it. I'd suggest grabbing SOURCER to disassemble it as well, it does better than Ghidra with DOS programs in either format.

@Parzi Oh! I just saw that after my response. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I’m gonna download this and see if I can make it work!