Art Alexion on 21 Jan 2006 17:49:49 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] ASCII files


schwepes@netaxs.com wrote:

>On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 05:32:15PM -0500, schwepes@netaxs.com wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>  [18 lines, 148 words, 997 characters]  Top characters: _toanrsl
>>>
>>>This is a modest problem but extremely frustrating.  For years, and
>>>from the name of the program, some of you will guess how many years,
>>>I have used Multimate as a word processor.  This was a DOS program
>>>by the same folks that brought you DBASE.  I converted files from
>>>that to ASCII.txt and then tried to use them in a Linux environment,
>>>Suse to be precise, and mtype refuses to read the whole file.  It
>>>drops in the middle of a line where there should be no bizarre
>>>characters to be read.  Mcopy gives an error messege when I try to
>>>invoke it.  I really want to be able to trash the machine and gain
>>>the workspace but I don't want to waste time typing everything out
>>>again in vi or gnu.
>>>      
>>>
>>It would be interesting to see what you get from trying to read it in
>>emacs, or, more simply, by watching what "cat -v | more" says about
>>the contents.
>>    
>>
>
>cat -v | more produces the first half as good solid text and the second
>half is long winded garbage.
>  
>

Sounds to me that it could be one of two things.  Either the multimate
program is not properly converting to ascii, and leaving binary stuff,
or -- more likely -- there is a disc error corrupting the file.

I say "more likely" because of your mention of an i/o error.

Have you tried opening the ascii files with a DOS edit on the
originating machine?

Another thing you might try is opening the original multimate files in
another editor that can read them and then saving them to a format like
RTF that things like openoffice can read, that way you (1) save your
formatting as well as your text, and (2) possibly avoid the problem you
are now having.  Does multimate, itself, export to RTF?

-- 

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Art Alexion
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