NANY 2024 - WordStar to Markdown converter

[Tuxman]

While mouser plays games, I learned how to write a parser.

NANY 2024 Entry Information

Application Name	ws2markdown
Version	0.2.0
Short Description	Converts .ws into .md (= WordStar into Markdown).
Supported OSes
Download Link	See "Installation"
Version History	0.2.0: A few quality improvements for a better first start experience. 0.1.0: First version. Could actually work. (Tried with ws2markdown's README.)
Author

Description
This is a small utility that converts WordStar (.ws) into Markdown (.md) files. I wrote it because the WordPress input field sucks, so now I can write my blog posts in a real text processing software, then convert them into Markdown and upload them with one of the gazillion Markdown-to-WordPress converters. There is no good Markdown editor either, I'm afraid.

Features
Can convert (basic) WordStar files into Markdown.

Planned Features
A couple of (non-Markdown-compliant) dot commands are not supported (= detected as dot commands) yet. Maybe I'll push an update. Or I'll just wait for contributions.

Screenshots


Usage
Installation

Code

% cargo install ws2markdown

Using the Application

Code

Usage: ws2markdown [inputfile.ws] [outputfile.md]
If inputfile = empty, a file picker will appear.
If outputfile = empty, the output will be printed to stdout.

Uninstallation

Code

% cargo uninstall ws2markdown

Tips
Yes, please.

Known Issues
Complex WordStar documents might still spawn dot commands in your text. See "Planned Features" for the reason.

[Shades]

It may be a colorful opinion, but the people behind both AsciiDoc and Markdown editors appear to be of the same stubborn breed. If you want to stir their hornet's nest, just mention a desire for a WYSIWYG editor.

At the time I depended a lot on PanDoc for converting documents. it came with support for MarkDown (different dialects) and AsciiDoc already built-in.

For my own documenting needs, I have been using xWwiki lately. While the web-editor that comes with it it certainly has it quirks, it has practically all the features Wordpad has and many of its WYSIWYG capabilities. The source it generates is very human readable, imports MS Office and Libre Office documents directly. Even PDF works well. It takes some doing setting it all up in a Linux VM, but now that I have it, it quickly has become my goto application for making documents.

[Tuxman]

Pandoc does not support WordStar and I’m not interested in learning Haskell; for everything else, it is a pretty good tool.

[Tuxman]

It's on Crates now:
https://crates.io/crates/ws2markdown