Conversion WP to Word (Levit James Crosswords) (XP

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I’d like to hear from anyone who has resolved problems with paragraph numbering with L&J(CW).

I’ve just run a trial conversion and found that the package seemed to stumble. I’d thought that it ought to deal with a vanilla WPerect conversion without getting thrown, but it seems to have missed blatantly obvious number strings immediately following a hard-return (e.g. “3.00”).

Not slamming L&J, It’s my first essay with CW, but I’m wondering if anyone out there has got it working. I’ll be in touch with their tech support, of course.

FWIW I have my own conversion suite, and it worked really well doing WP5.1(DOS) conversions through Word97, but now I’m faced with Corel9.0 et al, real Windows documents with styles etc, and Word/XP’s conversion filters seem to smart (or dumb) for their own good – I get a slew of {ListNum} fields which are out of whack, and it would be just too much extra work to fix the problems caused by this.

I have one option up my sleeve – some WPerf macros that will hard-code every numbered style in WPerf so my own suite can go to work on what it does best – converting hard-coded numbering to styles, but in the meantime, I’d like to know if L&J(CW) is working for anyone bringing in Corel9 to Word/XP.

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Our law firm uses Levit & James’ products, with great success. When we planned our WP to Word conversion (Spring 2002) we submitted a sample set of docs (100+) to L&J so they could get an idea of the peculiarities our WP docs presented. L&J worked very hard to look at issues in conversion, sometimes doc by doc, and they fine tuned our .ini settings so we had very few cleanup issues post-conversion. They seem to enjoy working with users of their products. I suggest you give them a call (I don’t remember if it was Ian or Ted who looked at this sort of thing) and ask if they could look at the WP docs and make some suggestions or tweaks.

After we convert, we use their Stylizer product to apply firm styles to the docs, and to appy Wordtricks numbering styles to numbered paragraphs.

Anne

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> They seem to enjoy working with users of their products.

Thanks, Anne. I called them yesterday and am in the process of exchanging files. It’s still not clear to me that we will go a head and use them, because they don’t do one thing that we want.

I must admit that in a ten-minute call yesterday, I learned a great deal about the variety and capabilities of Word’s different versions of filters (97/2000/xp), and that is of great value to me.

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> learned a great deal about the variety and capabilities of Word’s different versions of filters (97/2000/xp)

Interesting. I heard from a programmer friend of mine (WordTricks creator for that matter) that the Japanese RTF converter does a better than fair job of handling the WP > Word > WP conversion. I haven’t the details but it may be worth your looking into.

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> the Japanese RTF converter

Karen, thanks for the comment. Are you suggesting that simply switching human-languages is better, or this a reference to a third-party package?

Here’s my program at the moment:
1) use 97 to effect a simple but well-working import from WPerfect, save as DOC
2) use my own application, runs in XP, to effect the customised post-conversion routines.
3) get paid for that.

My next step is to revisit the three sets of converter files I’ve accumulated (97, 2000,xp) and experiment with a batch file that will switch between three sets, while continuing to use XP. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s worth a try. That would give me a lot more power.

If your programmer friend would like to establish contact, I’d be happy to communicate what i already know.

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(later) I have since discovered that Word’s conversion filters differ markedly between 97/2000/xp, and am putting together a little batch file that should allow me to switch between the three. L&J disable the XP filters and revert to the safer/simpler 2000; I’d like the option to go right back to 97, because the conversion then, while simpler, was a great deal more consistent.

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