Batch Text Conversion From MAC to PC - Suggestions???

[Plasma Man]

Hi,

Here are some examples of text files converted from The Old But Mighty Fine Clarisworks (most likely the 1993 edition): -

... Tu Žs divina e graciosa
Est‡tua majestosa do amor ...

... poesia bil'ngŸe ...

... ÔDigitationsÕ is a botanical term ...

... I know a mouse and he hasnÕt got a house
I donÕt know why I call him Gerald ....

I have a ton of this stuff in a number of differnent languages and I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. I seem to remember that this is an 7 bit to 8 bit conversion problem (or vice versa). It still crops up from time to time and drives everyone involved nuts!

Someone here MUST know of a fantastic utility that will batch convert hundreds of text files like these into either PC unicode *.txt and/ or *.rtf files. I've searched and searched. Btw, I mostly use Unicode fonts for general multi-lingual sanity.

Btw, just tried with NoteTab Pro (Fookes) which claims to handle this but it's no go there.

Thanks in advance!

Andre

[Darwin]

Conversions Plus (http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/index.html)? I've no idea if it will do this, and you may have already given it a go but...

[Plasma Man]

Thanks for the suggestion. Dataviz claim to have the all-in-one solution but guess what? No demos available. The same with nearly all the other solutions I've looked at. They just assume you will buy ...  the kind of mentality we all saw in the early days of shareware. 

MacDisk http://www.macdisk.com/conven.php3 offer a MAC translation utility but the UI is nearly impossible to use - a real shame because it looks like they have done their homework.

For the time being I've been working with Replacer Mode in the trusty Handy File Tool v1.2 http://www.handyfiletool.com/ - one of my fave file tools. A pain to have to create a multi search/replace list manually ... but I can report some progress.

Not sure if Mouser or any of the other guys here would be interested in cooking up a nice compact drag n drop MAC / PC format text conversion tool, but hey, it could be good!

Andre

[mouser]

If you can find a commandline tool that can convert a single file,
then you can use my Drag+Drop Robot to convert thousands using drag and drop easily.

[Plasma Man]

If you can find a commandline tool that can convert a single file,
then you can use my Drag+Drop Robot to convert thousands using drag and drop easily.

That's a great utility! I've found a couple of other small apps for text conversion, but the results are only about 30% successful. I'll ask these guys and see what they suggest.

[Plasma Man]

Just a quick update here.

Using MacDrive http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/ I could access all my old floppies.

I copied the Clarisworks files (*.cwk) across to a new folder in XP. Then with this small utility http://www.macdisk.com/mactxten.php3 I converted everything to RTF with all diacriticals and most of the formatting in tact. (hooray!)

For anyone interested more about keyboard layouts and speical keys: http://www.starr.net/is/type/kbh.html

Next project ... Fonts ...

Andre

[Plasma Man]

Conversions Plus (http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/index.html)? I've no idea if it will do this, and you may have already given it a go but...

I finally got to use Conversion Plus on a friend's computer. I ran a number of tests covering a range of text, spreadsheet and database docs and it seems to work smoothly and handles foreign language materials well.

Some observations on Conversions Plus:

- by default it converts everything to Times Roman (i.e. no font output option).

- it will not open folders with symbols or "non-english" characters - you'll have to rename those folders using plain text. Example: "Br>!" has to be changed to "Br". This will catch you out the first time, since there is no warning from CP that it cannot open the folder.

- double quotation marks such as [ " hello " ] will often appear as [ _ hello' ]

- text formatting is approx 90% spot on - expect at llittle editing to tidy up errant tabs, indents etc.

- you'll need to manually insert the field headings in speadsheet & database docs

- doumentation is minimal. For more detail on Mac formats you'll have to go to MacDisk. They provide detailed information on nearly any Mac format you could think of, which you'll see listed here on their site map:
http://www.macdisk.com/sitemapen.php3.

Basically DataViz Conversion Plus works - it's easy to use, handles batch processing and supports most of the commonly used MAC formats - so it gets my recommendation.

Andre