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How To Convert Pmd To Word?

Help me convert 20-year-old word processing files into a current format

  • I have a bunch of old word processing files created in the early to mid 1990s. I can no longer open them without turning them into a jumble of unformatted text and symbols, and I'm hoping there's some kind of amazing program that can both identify old file types and then convert them to a current program.Details inside. The files were created on early/mid-90s PCs running DOS and then Windows (the main one being a Toshiba T1000LE, with its oh-so-amazing 20 MB hard drive). I don't know what word processing programs were used. I would have suspected early versions of Word and/or WordPerfect, but when I try changing the file extensions to things like .wpd and .doc it doesn't help. (Unfortunately when I saved the files back in the 90s I didn't quite understand the function of file extensions and deleted them all.) I now have a Mac running OS X 10.9.4. I can sort of open the files in Word for Mac 2011, going via a pop-up box that says "Convert file from" which gives me a bunch of options like "MS-DOS Text" and "Unicode File." The results aren't pretty, and lose a lot of formatting and add tons of random characters. I could manually clean up the files one by one and save them anew, but ideally there is some magic program that will tell me what program made each file and then convert beautifully to Word for Mac 2011. Help? Thanks!

  • Answer:

    https://www.openoffice.org/why/index.html is one. http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/ is another. See if either of these fit the bill.

bassomatic at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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From the command line, type "file -k filename". File's been around for decades, and contains the DNA of hundreds of long-dead file formats. You might get lucky.

Leon

Thanks everyone! I've now deduced that the files were created in an old version of WordPerfect, and after changing the extensions to .wp (or .wpd, both seem to work) I can open the files using OpenOffice. There's still a line or two of symbols at top, but I can delete that and then save as a Word document. Two of the very oldest files created in 1991 render mostly junk, so it's possible they're corrupted. Considering they've been copied over the years from floppies to CDs and to various hard drives, I'm not too surprised. You have all just helped me cross a big-ticket item off my to-do list. Thank you. Bonus question: Is there any file format that's more likely to be readable in 20 more years? Or is the secret to keep saving in new formats every so often?

bassomatic

If you can post a sample file somewhere (like on dropbox or something) you'll have a much better chance at someone being able to help you. There were a myriad of word processors available at that time; Word and WordPerfect were popular, but they were by no means ubiquitous.

Aleyn

Open it in TextEdit or BBEdit and look at the first line or two, there may be a clue to which program it is.

Sophont

Copy one of the files, rename it to be [filename].chk and run one or both of http://www.ericphelps.com/uncheck/ over it. They're designed to recover the filetypes of files found when running scandisk or chkdsk, which automatically add the .chk suffix. You might get lucky and find that of of the tools can pull the extension out of the file for you. Googling that will hopefully lead you to an app that can open the file correctly.

Solomon

paste the output of the first page of xxd file.dat | more into a <pre> section here, making sure no obvious private text is readable. If file can't handle it, maybe we can. It probably uses upper bits shifted to indicate control codes, hence the line noise look.

scruss

Damn! I was hoping for Wordstar.

InsertNiftyNameHere

Leon! Took me a minute to figure out how to use the file -k command in the terminal, but bingo: (Corel/WP). Now at least I know what kind of file I'm dealing with. Bonus thing I learned: You just drag a file to the terminal window and it automatically writes out the file path.

bassomatic

Have you ever wanted to convert files without the need to download software ? http://www.http://www.zamzar.com/com/

theora55

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