🚀 go-pugleaf

On 13 Jun 1999 22:44:22 -0500, Preston Landers <planders@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
>Hi there,
>
>I'm looking for a Free Software program/script/whatever to help me
>extract ASCII text out of miscelaneus ancient wordprocessor formats.
>In particular, various old versions of WordPerfect on both DOS and
>Mac.  I've searched the net high and low but haven't found ANYTHING to 
>help me.  I can do a simple translation with a Perl script to strip
>out the 8-bit characters, but the document is still next to unreable
>(no line breaks, etc.)  

Most WP formats don't _have_ linebreaks.  Paragraphs are formatted
at runtime.

>I thought there would be a GNU program to "get the text" out of a
>binary file but I can't seem to find it.  That still doesn't solve the 
>problem of making it semi-readable (proper line formatting.)

I do a "cat <filename> | strings | fmt"

Not perfect, but simple and easy.

strings(1)            GNU Development Tools            strings(1)

NAME
       strings  -  print  the  strings of printable characters in
       files

SYNOPSIS
       strings
              [-a|-|--all] [-f|--print-file-name] [-o] [--help]
              [-v|--version] [-n
              min-len|-min-len|--bytes=min-len] [-t
              {o,x,d}[--target=bfdname] |--radix={o,x,d}] file

DESCRIPTION
       For  each  file  given,  GNU  strings prints the printable
       character sequences that are at least  4  characters  long
       (or  the number given with the options below) and are fol-
       lowed by an unprintable character.  By  default,  it  only
       prints  the  strings  from the initialized and loaded sec-
       tions of object files; for other types of files, it prints
       the strings from the whole file.

FMT(1)                                                     FMT(1)

NAME
       fmt - simple optimal text formatter

SYNOPSIS
       fmt  [-cstu] [-width] [-w width] [-p prefix] [--crown-mar-
       gin] [--split-only] [--tagged-paragraph]  [--uniform-spac-
       ing]  [--width=width]  [--prefix=prefix]  [--help] [--ver-
       sion] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION
       This manual page documents the GNU version of fmt.  fmt is
       a simple text formatter that fills and joins lines to pro-
       duce output lines of (up to) the specified width  (default
       75).  However fmt uses a best-fit line breaking algorithm,
       by a simple version of "Breaking Paragraphs  into  Lines",
       Donald  E.  Knuth and Michael F. Plass, Software--Practice

-- 
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's
supposed to do.
		-- R. A. Heinlein