Re: Document conversion

[jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Dorothy Day wrote:

> The NBWin filters are Wordport and quite up to date. Current offerings
> include
>
> MSWord for DOS v. 3,4,5,5.5
> MSWord for Windows 2,6,7,8(Word97)
> WP for DOS 5,5.1,5.2,6.0,6.1
> WP (Corel) 7,8
> NB DOS 2,3,4
> NBWin
> Signature
> Xy 2,3/3+,4
> (& lots of less in-demand formats)
>
> Unfortunately, the RTF filter is still under development, so you're
> limited to listed formats till that comes out.
>

That's interesting to find out, and makes perfect sense. ACI seems to have
this document conversion niche all to themselves these days.

I don't know how the modules behave within NB, but I have been quite
underwhelmed with the full-blown WordPort product. I first bought the
16-bit version, and upgraded that through its final version. On my system,
this is usually run under Win-OS/2 (a sub-system of OS/2, which runs most
16-bit WIN programs rather well, so long as they predate the advent of MS
going to Win32S extensions greater than ver. 1.25 -- which is not a relevant
factor in this case, per ACI).  On certain kinds of conversion, this GPFs
so much as to be useless. I have tried it under _real_ Win 3.11, with much
the same results.

Next, I bought a license for their 32-bit version (current release, as of
about 6 months ago), which I run under NT-4. It GPFs significantly less,
but the conversions aren't any better. My conversations about this with ACI
have been less than satisfactory, in terms of explanation or results.

A major reason why I bought this product -- besides the fact that there
doesn't seem to be any other option at this point -- was to be able to
convert formatted documents back and forth between XY4 and later versions of
Word, primarily the version in MS. OFC. '97. Curiously enough, it was the
conversions from XY into WORD '97 that would crash WordPort. (Perhaps the
fact that WordPort would mistake many WORD 6, 7, 8, or '97 doc.s for RTF had
something to do with this . . . ?). Converting the other way, into XY-3 or
XY-4, had no crash consequences, it just yielded a _way_ over-formatted XY
file, in which a great deal of the conversion was quite wrong. I can
understand and overlook fonts not matching up, but the rest ? I would like
to be able to say that it's better than nothing, but am not sure if I can
even go that far. Suffice to say that I haven't been able to get that much
practical use out of it, and would need a great deal of convincing before
purchasing any upgrades.


Jordan