Support for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice compressed XML has been added. The results are useable, but most fancy formatting is lost in the process. This is very much a work in progress, check our web site often.
Many thousands of people have downloaded this program and very few have
ever paid anything. This is the nature of Shareware. Nobody
will ever get rich from it! We use the money to help defray the cost
of the web site and when we find ourselves in between projects (That is
a consultant's term for being jobless!), we have a flurry of creativity
which helps to tide us over to the next major project. Most of the
time, we almost break even, so your contributions are appreciated.
The latest versions of WordPerfect can convert between most file formats, but converting thousands of files one by one is not a good prospect and will wear out several mice, not to mention one's patience. We clearly needed a program that would churn unattended through thousands of files with various formats and convert them all to a generic format.
At first we tried a simple stripping of control characters, but the results looked very ugly. Furthermore, newer file formats such as WordPerfect 5.1 and later, starts off with a header, which made the final result so ugly that it was quite useless.
Consequently, we had to analyze the data files in order to learn something about their structure. This effort required a large amount of patience but it paid off in the end. The conversions were kept simple, to allow maximum compatibility with word processing and hyper text editors. ( A long time after, we found that Corel has a Software Development Kit hidden on their web site, which documents most of the file formats - sigh...).
Corel kept their file formats pretty much the same since version 6 of WordPerfect. Even so, versions 8 and 9 can create files that will cause version 7 to crash when one tries to open the file (and vice versa!). PTT can be used to strip the control characters from a file so that it can be read by any word processor. Most of the formatting will be lost, but it can save you an awful amount of retyping when your word processor won't open a file at all, or worse, just blows up on you.
PTT was designed to be easy to use, whether you want to convert a single
file, or several thousand files at once.
If you have Windows Explorer running, then you can highlight the files that you want to convert and then click, drag and drop them all with a mouse onto the PTT program dialog. The selected filenames will be transferred to the 'From' box, as above. (Click the top file, press the Shift key, click the bottom file and they will all be highlighted. Another way is from the Explorer menu Edit, Select All).
The maximum number of files that can be converted at once depends
on the length of the file names but if we assume an average filename of
20 characters then the limit is about 3000 files! There is
no technical reason for this limit, except that we felt that it was enough
for all practical purposes.
In the event that the conversion looks ugly, you can manually try the
other formats and see whether it works any better, but all the files in
the 'From' box should preferably be of the same type when
you do this manually, else the results may be confusing.
Files in the plain text '.txt' format can be opened by any word processor. These files will contain all the content of the original files but almost all formatting will be lost, except for tabs and indents. This is a good way to move the contents of a document between incompatible word processing programs.
Files in the hyper text '.html' format can be opened by
any web browser. Some of the formatting will be retained, but web browsers
handle text differently from word processors. For instance, the paragraphs
will change shape when the browser is resized on screen.
This only works for .WPD files, WP versions 6/7/8/9.
No known problems.