April 06, 2003

Converting WordPerfect files

libwpd - Library for importing/exporting WordPerfect v6-v10 files. Found this while glancing at OpenOffice foo. My main interest is modifying the following process:

  • Get a file created in WordPerfect 5.1 (no joke)
  • Open the file in WordPerfect 8
  • Use 'Internet Publisher' to save as HTML
  • Run the HTML file through a Perl script which tries to chunk out the content into 50 self-contained chunks, tagging each with a title and section along the way.
  • The WP5.1->WP8.0->HTML conversion isn't seamless, so a little manual editing is required, mostly to let the Perl script know where a new chunk begins. </ul>

    It's hugely brittle, but it only takes about 20-30 minutes or so to do the conversion, do the parsing, upload the results to a website and reindex them. And it only happens once a month. But still...

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