[OS X TeX] Convert ChiWrite to ... anything?

[Mark Smith]

david craig wrote:

>Anyone at all familiar with a program called "ChiWrite"?

Yes

>It was apparently a Windows scientific word processing program available
>in the mid 90's.

I knew it breifly (and unhappily) as a DOS wp around about 1989-1991 (I
think it also ran on VAX terminals but that may have been via a DOS
emulator. Don't think there was a Windows version, but I could be wrong.)

>I don't have any more details about it, but could probably investigate
>some more if need be.

The program (assuming its the same one) was actually called Chiwriter. A
quick Google threw up this:

<http://www.horstmann.com/ChiWriter/>

which seems to answer your question...

>A colleague has some old ChiWrite files that we need converted into
>something -- ANYTHING -- useful.  Word, pdf, really don't care.  Any ideas?

Looks like you can go to text or postscript, but it *may* be that you need
a working copy of chiwriter to do either effectively, e.g. *if* the native
format is a binary rather than a text file.

Its not clear from that page whether Chiwriter files were text (no doubt,
if so, with some hideous markup) or binary. Either way you may be able to
get a lot of the text out with e.g. BBEdit.

(The above page notes that you will lose font into and equations if you
export to text. Apparently there used to be a Chiwriter to TeX converter.
Its not longer available, but you might be able to find it *somewhere*.)

Good luck,

mark.
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