converting XyWrite 4.017 diacriticals

[Tom Roche troche@xxxxxxxx]

Hello:

Has anyone had experience converting XyWrite 4.017 characters with
diacriticals? I need to get several XyWrite 4.017 files into either XyWrite
3+ or WP5.1 for DOS, but have found that almost all special characters
are converted to strings of smiley faces, boxes, exclamation points,
triangles, etc. Affected characters include a grave, e grave, a circumflex,
o circumflex, a umlaut, e umlaut, the ascii character for an em dash (260),
and others. All possible methods of converting to WP5.1 or XyWrite 3+
seem to produce the same result, including Word for Word and XyWin
4.12 (the characters look normal in XyWin). The author of the files is not
easily accessible to us, and we don't have XyWrite 4.017.

Could XyWrite 4.017 convert the files and preserve the special
characters? If not, is there any other way?

I would appreciate any suggestions for working aroud this problem. I
could make a master document or rig up a search-and-replace macro to
run on the converted files, but since the manuscript is so large (over
1,000 pages) and I'm not really sure what characters are in it (French,
German, transliterated Greek, etc.), this would only be a partial solution.
Also, this would work only if each character produces a distinct string of
gibberish, but, in an recent (abortive) attempt to convert files from
Notabene 4.2, we got the same string from different characters (eastern
European, in that case).

Thanks in advance,

Tom Roche
Johns Hopkins University Press
(410) 516-6897