Re: Conversion from XyWrite to Warp

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Fri, 6 Feb 1998, Robert Hemenway wrote:

> You can also use an application called Word for Word, which was
> developed by Mastersoft and then sold, I think, to Adobe. The conversion
> files that XyWrite and other programs use were leased from Mastersoft.
>
> Adobe once published Word for Word on an Adobe File Utilities CD, which
> also had Acrobat Reader, a Viewer that lets you read files in many
> formats without loading the app, and a couple of others.


Surprise, Adobe sold its File Utilties to Inso, current owner of
Dynatext, Outside In and Quickview Plus, among a host of other power
tools. File Utilities (i.e. Word for Word) is "on hold," to be reissued
"at a later date."

Meanwhile, Quickview Plus (which was tossed in as a freebie with
Mijenix's Power Desk, which has as its central feature Explorer Plus, an
enhanced Explorer for Win95) allows incredibly fast viewing of just
about any file format you can throw at it. I tested it the other night,
and it even correctly recognizes Nota Bene's ≪MDIT≫ as italics. It
*doesn't* handle counters, so outlines just display as sequential lines,
not as indented points. It knows about XW deltas, and simply ignores
those it can't interpret.

But it handles more common filetypes even better, including recent
versions of HTML, Word, Word Perfect, and various other Office
applications. Asked it to look at an Excel data file (gradesheet for a
course I taught last semester), and it instantly displayed the
spreadsheet. This is invoked (executed) by right-clicking on the
filename in Explorer Plus (and I assume would work the same way with
Explorer). It will call for you any application needed to edit a file,
though it doesn't actually do any editing itself.

That's not the same thing as *converting* between formats. But if you
just need to *view* a file in some foreign format, nothing could be
quicker. Then you can jump through whatever hoops are required to get
the text and/or data into a format usable by the target application.

I tracked down Inso's site at:

    http://www.inso.com/

A newer version than the one I have adds Office97 and other bleeding
edge formats. They have a downloadable trial version at the site.

Even older versions of W4W did a good job of converting XY3+ files
to/from Word/Word Perfect earlier versions. Surplus outfits may have it
for a song, and when/if the new version is released, upgrades should be
pretty cheap.


*****
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx	
*****
	"He also surfs who only sits and waits."