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Subject:RE: WordPerfect 8.00.225 to Word 9.0.2720 From:"Cekis, Margaret" <Margaret -at- mediaocean -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 13 Mar 2002 14:46:59 -0500
Mark Lockwood [mailto:markl -at- dicecorp -dot- com] deplored problems converting large
documents from WordPerfect 8.00.225 to Word 9.0.2720
_______________________________________
Mark:
It's been a couple of years, but I converted several large WP documents from
WP8.0 and earlier (probably back to WP4) to Word 2000. Because Microsoft
bought the company with the best conversion filters, letting Word do the
conversion is better than trying to let WP do it. Your problem with the
import of large files may be that you are running out of "buffer" or
"working directory" space, which is the same thing that locks up large Word
files when you have a long TOC, an Index, and lots of links and bookmarks.
[Once upon a time there was a user- configurable setting for this, but
despite the fact that today's computers have vastly larger amounts of RAM
and humongous hard drives,
MS has not allowed users this option since prior to Word 97.]
Therefore, if the documents are very long, break them into logical sub files
of a more manageable size (no more than 1 or 2 Mbytes each). Do not import
the documents. Just open each one in Word. It will fumble a bit, then
display a message box telling you it is calling its conversion utilities.
Then it may ask you to confirm that the document to be opened is a
WordPerfect file. Agree with it. Then it will hover for a while longer,
and open the document with the bulk of the formatting intact. There may be
some bad sections, and there may be line breaks at the end of every line,
but it is probably the best that you can get, and it is better than what you
get if you use import. I don't know why that is, either.
If tables come over badly, convert them to text in WP before you load the
files into word. Figures copy nicely between the formats, unless you have
WPDraw illustrations. Open the doc in WP, and open a new Word file, then
cut and paste the figures and their captions into the Word doc. This reduces
the size of the files that you are processing, in addition to eliminating
anything that will choke the text conversion filter. You can get rid of all
the line breaks by selecting a section of text, selecting a paragraph style,
then clicking AutoText. It usually turns it all into nice paragraphs.
The biggest problem I had with the test plan documents that I converted was
that the author's) had not used styles correctly in the first place. Every
thing was normal text, tabbed or spaced to indent.
Some of your problems may have the same cause. Not everyone who uses a word
processor uses the features that make it most useful.
Good Luck,
Margaret Cekis
Margaret -at- MediaOcean -dot- com
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