View single post by Robert

Posted: Thu Aug 28th, 2014 13:33

Joined:	Mon Apr 2nd, 2012
Location:	South Lakeland, UK
Posts:	4066
Status:	Offline

I have resumed my long term project of preparing the text of my late fathers manuscript which he typed in 1972 but although accepted for publication he never finished it before he died in 1978, they asked him to re-type the whole manuscript again for the third time. With 240,000 words many in botanical Latin and many foreign place and personal names, it was a task too large with failing eyesight and ill health.

I OCR'd the manuscript using early scanners then a Nikon D1 to make the images. I had done all the spell checking and text layout but still needed to tackle the character formatting, I have been distracted by various projects but last week I returned to the manuscript on the 20th August. Imagine my amazement when I realised the last save date of the most recent version was 20th August 2011! o.O

Exactly 3 years ago, to the day, almost to the hour.

I am making good progress with the character styles in the main body of text, but realised I needed to check out the auxiliary text, the introduction, preface and glossary of terms etc. After much searching I eventually found them on an archive backup disk. However... They had been saved from Microsoft Word 4.0 in 2002. I no longer use MS Word and I don't have any word processor capable of opening an MS Word 4.0 file.

I turned to Text Wrangler, which did the job perfectly. So if you have the need to open an old text file on a Mac try Text Wrangler, no frills but it's quick and did the job perfectly for me.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11009/textwrangler

____________________
Robert.