Document from 1993 (DOS)

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I’ve got a 100 page document from 1993, produced with Word for DOS. It opens with Word 2003, but the formatting is lost, and there are illegible sections. I’d like to be able to bring it up to modern form without having to do a lot of manual reformatting, etc. (Word for DOS used style sheets to format things; I’ve got the style sheet files, but of course Word 2003 doesn’t know what to do with them.)

Is there a way?

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Cor Lou, thank is a real conundrum. I have in the past had old documents and sometimes found that if I “washed” them through notepad some of the illegible text kind of found its place…obviously formatting went completely out of the window, so to speak. I then copied and pasted into Word. Anyway that is my worth, there may be other solutions out there, good luck

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I haven’t tried it myself, but you can download a free evaluation copy of ABC Amber Text Converter. It can convert from Word for MS-DOS to Word for Windows.

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I tried ABC Amber Text Converter. It’s easy to use, and it worked well on a test conversion from Word 2003 to .PDF.

Unfortunately for me, my ancient document is in Word 5.5 format, and Amber Text Converter only goes back as far as Word 6.0. Unless somebody comes up with a solution, I’ll just have to bite the bullet and make the conversion manually.

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I think Word 97 could open Word 5.5 documents. If you know someone who still has Word 97, you might ask him/her to convert the document to Word 97 format; this is the same as that used by Word 2003.

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Lou

If you get really desperate, I could load Winword 2.0 onto a spare box, and give the conversion a whirl. I’m pretty sure it’s of about the same vintage and can handle Word for DOS. Give a yell if nothing else works for you.

Alan

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The Office 2000 Resource Kit also included a converter for Word 2.0-6.0 for DOS. There were some security vulnerabilities in one or more converters a few years ago, which could explain why it has been removed from the downloads available at Microsoft.com.

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Hi Jefferson,

The copy of the ORK I’ve got (Version 1.10.101.0, dated 1 February 2003) came without the supplemental converters. They came separately – my copy of the Microsoft Office Converter Pack (Version 4.71.1015.0) is dated 24 April 1999. Curiously (or not) MSKB article 96119, titled “History of WinWord File Converters Categorized by Release”, doesn’t even admit to this version’s existence.

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Hi Lou,

I’ve got FrameMaker 5.5.6 on my machine, and it’s got filters going back to Word DOS 3.0. If you’d like, you can send me the document privately and I can send you back a file after importing, then saving back out in .doc format (Frame’s also got an export filter). andrewsavikas_AT_gmail.com.

Cheers,

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Thanks for the offer. My local resources don’t seem to have anything that can handle this, so I’ve sent you the document under separate cover. It’s not REALLY 100 pages long — more like 70 as I recall.

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The document has been converted, and it looks pretty good. Office 2000 with supplemental filters was able to turn my Word 5.5 document into its Word 2003 equivalent.

The styles from the Word 5.5 Style Sheet were preserved, though some of the fonts are now different (I had done a lot of tweaking of the printer driver back then, so I’m not surprised to find unusual fonts in there today). It won’t be hard to change the styles to include the fonts I want. The Table of Contents is no longer automatically updated, but the old Word 5.5 hidden text that created the TOC is still there, and it won’t be too hard to convert those entries to their current equivalents.

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