12.15.08

WordPerfect meets Spotlight

Posted in Software at 1:59 am by Smokey

Because of my involvement with the libwpd and NeoOffice projects, and as a long-time WordPerfect user (5.1/6.0/3.1/3.5.x), I often get asked how Spotlight can find the contents of users’ old WordPerfect files, particularly WordPerfect for DOS and WordPerfect for Windows documents of switchers. There wasn’t an easy answer for a long time. Starting in the fall of 2002, libwpd and its utilities have supported translating (and obviously reading the text content from) an increasing number of WordPerfect file formats (thanks to the efforts of William Lachance, Marc uwog Maurer, and Fridrich Štrba). Since June 2005 Gero Herrmann’s WordPerfect Spotlight importer has allowed Spotlight to index WP-Mac documents (version 2.1 and higher) and metadata. However, the former didn’t talk to Spotlight, and the latter only supported indexing the file formats of WordPerfect for Macintosh.

The obvious solution to this problem was to tie libwpd and the WordPerfect Spotlight importer together, which is what Gero Hermann has now done in version 2.0 of his importer. While Mac WordPerfect documents will produce more metadata, the text content of WordPerfect documents from any platform (at least since version 4.2, which is the earliest non-Mac document version supported by libwpd) will now be available to Spotlight.

Note that if you already have WP documents on your Mac, Spotlight has already tagged them with a dummy kMDItemContentType, something like dyn.ah62d4rv4ge81s6de, which will prevent Spotlight from using any newly-installed importer, like version 2.0 of the WordPerfect Spotlight importer, to index the text content of the file. Unfortunately the only way to fix this seems to be to completely delete and recreate your LaunchServices database and then trigger a full Spotlight reindex—and even then, Spotlight will not always re-assign the correct content type, for reasons that are not yet clear to me.

To delete and recreate your LaunchServices database and then trigger a full Spotlight reindex, use the following Terminal commands:

`locate lsregister` -kill -r -all local,system,user

sudo mdutil -E /

I’ll update this post if I learn of a better way to fix this situation.

Spotlight, meet WordPerfect; WordPerfect, welcome to the wonderful world of full-text searches.

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