Dear people,
Some of you may remember a couple of months ago, I was asking on the list if
there was a way of converting SAM wordprocessor files to some sort of
PC-compatible format. Basically, my problem was that I had 80 or so
WordMaster files (which together make up half a book about Pulp), and I
wanted to get them over to my elderly 486 without losing any of the
formatting. I'm posting my findings in case anyone ever needs to do
anything similar (or possibly point out a far easier way of doing it).
The most straightforward technique that I could find was basically to use
WordMaster's search/replace function to convert the files to HTML SAM-side,
then use Edwin's excellent SAM Diskimage thingy to load them on to the PC.
From there, of course, I could load the HTML files into Word and save them
in any format I wanted with all the bold, italics etc preserved.
So the main work was to get the WordMaster files into HTML. It's a pretty
straightforward process (albeit labourious if you've got 80 files to do!),
and I guess most of the people here will know the basic HTML tags, so the
following is probably superfluous, but here anyway are some pointers...
Obviously it doesn't have to be perfect, bug-free HTML - the only concern
should be for the resultant text to look more or less as it would if you
printed it out from the SAM. You need to put a <html> tag at the start of
the document, and from thereon it's all straigtforward: inv-I (for italics)
should be replaced with <i>; inv-i should be replaced with </i>; inv-E (for
bold) with <strong>; inv-e with </strong>; the newline (pointy-down arrow -
to input this into the search/replace box you need to press F9 then
SHIFT+RETURN) character with <br> or <p> according to whether it's a new
line (for which you need <br>) or a new paragraph (for which you need <p>);
the raised text/superscript character with <sup>; the lowered text/subscript
character with <sub>; and so on and so on. Basically keep going until all
of the WordMaster control characters have been replaced with HTML tags.
The result should be saved as FILENAME.htm, and then you should be able to
load it into your PC with Edwin's program, resulting in something fairly
close to what you started with on the SAM. Personally I found it helpful to
load the HTML files into Word and then save them as Word v2.0 files, because
doing that stripped away a lot of the superfluous formatting crap that you
get when you convert HTML into, say, a Word 97 file or RTF.
And with that, I'm off. It's been an interesting return to the list (most
pleased to have dropped in just when the Samsboss/Ritman/Broughton intrigue
was being cleared up), but now it's time to sub down once more. Bye bye
everybody!
Mark
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