On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Alex Hewitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A friend of ours wrote a bunch of recipe files using something called > Microsoft Write.
Yah, "Windows Write" is/was one of the "accessories" that came with Windows 3.x. It morphed into "WordPad" in Windows 95 and later. WordPad still exists. It won't write the Write (hah) format anymore, but it can read it, and save in some variant of the RTF format. > Theoretically Microsoft Word is supposed to be able to read such files > but I found that the version I was using (Word 2003) wouldn't. Curious. My install of Word 2003 can. Are you sure you installed all the import/export filters? If you did a "Minimal" or "Custom" install (instead of the mondo-huge "Full"), I don't think those are all included by default. > Writing a filter in Python was trivial and I was able to convert the > files to plain text. For future reference, the strings(1) command can be used to much the same effect. > ... the file itself in ASCII, a series of bytes again in non-ASCII, > followed by a repeat of some of the original ASCII. That sounds very similar to the MS Word .DOC format, and I bet they're related. DOC files do not interleave the formatting with the text, as (for example) HTML or Word Perfect did. Instead, all the plain text is stored in one blob, and then the formatting information is stored in a different blob. The formatting directives have "pointers" to the position of the text they effect. The "repeat" you describe is not actually a repeat, but a follow-on save. Word and friends work in an interesting fashion. You open the file, and it loads the base text blob described above. You start making your changes. Those changes go into an undo buffer. That undo buffer is actually backstored on the disk in temporary files. (That's why a directory containing Word files people are busy editing accumulates lots of odd temp files until they close the original.) When you invoke "Save", the undo buffer -- essentially like a "diff" -- gets tacked on to the end of the main file. This made saves fast on slow computers already overburdened by Microsoft bloatware. Loads were slower, of course, but the reasoning was that people care about save speed more than load speed. As you can imagine, if there are lots of saves, rebuilding the text is not so easy as running strings(1) on it. In Word, if you turn off "Fast Saves", it writes out a full, unified version of the text instead. This became the default at some point -- I have no idea when. > But the interesting thing was that I couldn't easily find a Microsoft tool > that > understood the format which originated with Windows 95 or an earlier version > of Windows. Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> WordPad My copy of Win XP Pro opens .WRI files automatically in WordPad. I just double-click the file. WordPad is an optional component for Windows. Perhaps the computer was installed with a "minimalist" attitude, so various optional tools were not there when you needed them? -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
