06.30.07
Picture Perfect
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy, er, back in the late 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the dominant word processor, ubiquitous (try finding commercial software today available on that many platforms) and powerful. The Mac version was Mac-like, a good citizen, easy to use and uncluttered yet still powerful (in fact, in 2007, the last released version, 3.5, dating to 1995—with a small but not insignificant update to 3.5e in 1997—does everything I’ve ever wanted to do with a word processor, save Unicode, and I’ve wanted to do some above-average things).
If you’ve been using computers since the late 80s or early 90s, or perhaps went to school in the mid/late 90s at an institution with a Novell network, chances are you have a collection of old WordPerfect documents. Fortunately (if you have any need of the data in those documents), some fine folks have created a very good file format translator (libwpd) for WordPerfect documents, which is available stand-alone and is also incorporated into open-source programs such as AbiWord, KWord, NeoOffice, and OpenOffice.org, and commercial products such as Nisus Writer Express. Currently libwpd supports most features of most common WordPerfect file formats, but the big missing piece was images. After all, everyone has some sort of images in their documents: logos in company letterhead, figures in reports or papers, clip art in family newsletters.
Last summer, the file format translator (libwpg) for the WordPerfect image format really took off, thanks to Ariya, but there was still no way to get a WordPerfect document with an image to open in any of those other applications and include the image. So close, but so far away….
This week Fridrich has been working on finally bringing libwpd and libwpg together, so that WordPerfect documents with images can be opened by other applications and retain their images—and the result looks good! Things are still rough, and and some images still won’t be converted properly, but you can see it with your own eyes; a new hope for old WordPerfect documents with images.
Thanks, Fridrich, Ariya, and all the other libwpd and libwpg hackers; this is indeed an exciting day!