Lost in translation

OK, so I now have my brother's electronic genealogy writings. But they're not much good if I can't read them. And this where I ran smack into the issue of technological obsolescence.

The email archives actually were easy. Both the older ones, in an ancient version of Eudora, and the more recent ones (i.e., circa 2002-2005), in early Apple Mail.app, were in a standard mailbox format that I could import directly into a more recent version of Apple mail. So they're readily readable.

The word-processing files, apparently a mix of AppleWorks 5 and Appleworks 6 formats, are another matter. When Apple declared "end of life" status for AppleWorks in 2007, they intended that the new iWork suite would replace AppleWorks, and iWork Pages was supposed to be able to open/convert AppleWorks Word docs. Furthermore, AW is supposed to be able to save files in Microsoft Word format. Finally, some versions of Microsoft Word are supposed to be able to open AppleWorks Word docs.

That's an awful lot of "supposed tos". The reality, I have found, is that there is no simple way to convert an AppleWorks Word doc into a modern word-processing file – at least, not with formatting retained. And, in the case of my brother's files, formatting can be pretty important; they tend to include embedded images; differing paragraph styles/font sizes/bold and italic styles to distinguish generations and types of information (formal and informal); footnotes; and even heavy use of a glyph font (WingDings) as a shorthand code for genealogical terms (born, died, married, divorced...). Poor translation of formatting can have results ranging from confusing to incomprehensible.

Let's start with iWork.Turns out the latest version (iWork 2013) won't have anything to do with AppleWorks. Fortunately, I have a trial version of iWork '09, which is the last version that can read AppleWorks. I copied one of the AW Word files (definitely AW6, per the tell-tale "[v6.0]" that AW inserts in the file name when it converts an earler file) to my MacBook Pro and attempted to open it in Pages. No dice. Whether I went through the File>Open menu or Ctrl-clicked on the file and told it to open in Pages, all Pages would do was give me the remarkably unhelpful message that "The file could not be opened."

OK, maybe it had something to do with the MacBook Pro running Mavericks. It wouldn't be the first time some process went totally wonky with an updated OS. I fired up my long-dormant MacBook – still comfortably running 10.6 Snow Leopard – installed the iWork '09 trial, and tried again. Same result. Can't install iWork on the old eMac; it requires at minimum 10.4.11 (Tiger), and probably more RAM than the old beast has.

How about Microsoft Word? Well, Word 2011 certainly doesn't recognize AW, but Word 2004 is supposed to, and that's still installed on the MacBook. Sure enough, it had an AppleWorks 6 file selection in the Open menu. Unfortunately, it seemed to believe that my file was not an AppleWorks file, and refused to open it.

Maybe I needed to go back even further with Word – I still have the install disc for Office: Mac 2001. It's only for PowerPC, so I couldn't install it on the MacBook, but I could install it on the eMac. Unfortunately, it turned out to have an import translater only for AppleWorks 5, not 6. I could scarcely believe I had a version of Word too old for my purpose! And I couldn't try Word 2004 directly on the eMac, because it needed 256MB of RAM.

(I should note that Word can in fact "Retrieve text from any document", including AppleWorks docs, but that strips all formatting and images, converts all special characters and fonts to plain text, and leaves a considerable amount of garbage at the beginning and end of the file. It's a method of last resort.)

Maybe I should try this from the AppleWorks end and export in .doc format. Since I didn't have Word on the eMac to open an exported document, I copied the AppleWorks app to the MacBook (AW won't run on anything higher than Snow Leopard) and opened my test document. The result? Pure gibberish, mostly consisting of the little boxes that signify unprintable characters. I suspect that AppleWorks, unlike most modern Mac applications, may require actual installation rather than just dropping it into the App folder. I was probably missing some crucial components that the installer package would have provided. I do not, unfortunately, have the eMac's install discs.

Exporting a .doc from AppleWorks on the eMac and transferring it to the MacBook, I opened it in Word 2004. Well, the text was there, but the formatting was dreadful, most of the images were missing, and the fonts were... erratic, to put it mildly. Some of the WingDings symbols appeared as they should; others were converted to symbols such as ≠; and still others to accented Roman letters. I even downloaded a demo version of an application that purported to convert AppleWorks documents to RTF, and opened the RTF in Word. No images, dreadful formatting, and more erratic translation of WingDings.

Some additional Googling suggests that the WingDings issues stems from differences between the Microsoft, Macintosh pre-OS X, and Unicode character maps; in brief, when the modern version of the font is used on a modern Mac, it doesn't necessarily display the same characters as the original. Which leads me to believe that, in order to correctly display (and possibly print) these documents, I need to do it using AppleWorks, on the old eMac. And I may even need to edit them in AppleWorks to change anything in the WingDings font to the plain text equivalent of my brother's "code", before converting them to Word docs.

The trouble is, the eMac's measly 128MB of RAM and elderly OS make it both sluggish and erratic; the system froze and had to be either Force Quit or hard-booted several times in the course of backing up the files, subsequent attempts at conversion, and installation of Word. So it seemed like my best bet might be to upgrade the RAM and the OS.

To be continued...