Is there a Perl Whiz out there?

[keithbrown]

I'm wondering if anyone has written a script that will automagically clean up the dozens of extra pages and garbage characters that show up when I take my old word docs and open them in NWE?

I really like NWE, after searching tirelessly for a Word replacement, but I have a TON of Word docs that I'd need to move over to NWE. I've tested this and I get a lot of Word--exclusive excriment in my pages when I open them in NWE. I'm willing to take the next, say, epoch, to manually go through and open each one, delete all the garbage save the good bits of text and save them off again, but I'm hoping there is someone out there who has written a decent script for that. Surely there must be, yes?

Just wondering.


Thanks in advance,

Keith.

[martin]

What kind of garbage characters are we talking about here? Are they actually in the document's text, or is this a file translation error? Eg: do the garbage characters appear when you open the files in Word itself?

One possible cause: make sure these files have a ".doc" extension. Otherwise they may be treated as plain text and all the binary data in the file will show up as gibberish.

[Bob Stern]

Try opening the Word file in TextEdit, then copy/paste to NWE.

[keithbrown]

Thanks, guys.

That second suggestion - to use TexEdit to open the Word files first and then copy the text into NWE - worked fabulously.

The problem I was getting opening the Word files in NWE wasn't that I was getting binary data, necessarily. It was that dozens of extra pages were being added to each file, no matter if they were no more than a page-long letter. There was some other Word doo-doo in there as well, which was not binary data but appeared to be more like Word marking its territory with chunks of text that made sense only to Word.

At any rate, opening the files in TextEdit first, stripped out all that and left me with just the words, which I can now paste into NWE and save off.

Very cool.

So cool, in fact, I just ordered a registration number for NWE and I'm now all legal and stuff.

It really seems like a good product, NWE. I plan to give it quite a workout in the months to come.

Before buying it, though, I did take a long look at Mellel, which, honestly, also seems like a very good product. But NWE's interface and ease of use won out for what I need the product to be. If I ever become some kind of serious author or academic - both of which are laughable - I might take another look at Mellel. But I'm not convinced that replacing Word with another, less ubiquitous verson of proprietary software, is really the way to go.

Keep it up NWE. I think I like this.


Thanks again,

Keith.

[martin]

I'm glad you found a solution that works for you Keith. If you wouldn't mind, can you send your document to expressfeedback@nisus.com so I can see if there's anything we can do to fix this in Express directly. Thanks.

[riccardo]

keithbrown said:

But I'm not convinced that replacing Word with another, less ubiquitous verson of proprietary software, is really the way to go.

Um, and how is NWE not proprietary? I'm not knocking proprietary, and I think you made a good choice, but just wondering how Mellel is any more proprietary than NWE?

[Bob Stern]

wondering how Mellel is any more proprietary than NWE?

NWE's native RTF format can be opened by users of Word, TextEdit, and many other apps. Mellel's native format cannot be opened by any other program.