As part of my long-term strategy of using DTPO as a repository of documents, I am going through 20+ years of Mac and ProDOS docs, culling the totally worthless and saving off the rest. I have two problems that I hope the collective here can shed some light on.
Background: I try to keep my Mac clean of any MS and Adobe product for several reasons that I don’t need to go into here. I recently noticed that a bunch of files that ought to be opened weren’t opening using TextEdit, Bean, Espresso, BBedit, and a bunch of other such apps. I’d get either nothing or garbage. My wife suggested checking a few of them on her mac, and they opened without a hitch. MS Word opened them. So I switched to a backup drive and installed Word 2008. Word recognizes and opens 85% of the files (see #2 below) and will do a “save as…” as either PDF or RTF, depending.
My question is: Is there any means (scripting? a 3rd party app?) where I can toss a folder of these files into a cruncher and have it spit out RTFs or PDFs while I go tour the town? Let me emphasize that there are a good ten thousand of these files and doing it manually would be an incredible waste of time and I’d opt to leave them alone and not stick them in DTPO.
The option of either RTF or PDF would be a manual choice where I’d have a folder full of text-only documents that would go the RTF route, and a folder full of text and graphics and layout that would go into the PDF bucket.
#2: I’ll post a new message as this one is getting too long.
The only reliable conversion is to let MS Word create PDF documents. Using another software or format is probably not going to be lossless. MS Word should be scriptable but I don’t know if its PDF output is scriptable.
At this point, it looks like some kind of AS that will call an Automator script that will open each doc in Word, do a Save As, select RTF, then Save. I would like to set this up to grind through thousands of such files while I’m off doing something else.
The problem is, I’m not a scripter or an Automator, and until some elves deliver what I need late some night, I’m just going to leave them alone. Maybe archive them to a DVD and forget about them. I don’t want to fry my brains trying to create my first AS and Automator scripts for something like this.
I’m not lazy but rather grossly incompetent when it comes to stuff like AS. “Digitally Impaired” some would say.
After a fair amount of internet detective work I found an application called MacLinkPlus that worked really well. I was able to drop folders of MS Word files and Appleworks files onto it and specify an output folder as well as the target file type. Some folders were to become PDF since they contained graphics and layout, while the rest became RTF files.
A side effect of this research turned up an app called EasyDraw, which was something I needed to convert some really ancient MacDraw documents into TIFFs.
So my problems are solved.
I can now have a good (if very wet) weekend here in Monroe County, Indiana.
