embedded text

[ngazidja]

A long, long time ago (I can still remember...) I used a facility in NWE to embed text. This is at least 10 years ago, probably more. It was quite cool, I recall, because I could write an article and just link in big chunks from another NWE document rather than either cut and pasting or retyping, and it meant that if I made changes in the linked text they were immediately reflected in the document that had the link. Very useful. But apparently no longer supported.

So I have a document which has the embedded text but the original seems to have disappeared (quite how I lost it is another mystery). But, and this is the curious thing, the text that was formerly text (at least I think it was - if I couldn't alter it directly I pretty sure I could click on it and the original document opened) is now apparently an image. Clicking on it just selects the entire text box and the text tool is inoperative (just the hand tool)

Does anyone remember this and, more helpfully, have any suggestions as to how I might extract the text? I could print it out and ocr it, except - and this is even curiouser - the text box doesn't seem to be big enough and the text it contains is truncated mid-sentence. Resizing doesn't help, presumably since the original document is gone and there's nothing elss to include if the box is resized.

Iain.

[martin]

A long, long time ago (I can still remember...) I used a facility in NWE to embed text. This is at least 10 years ago, probably more.

You say NWE (Nisus Writer Express), but I assume you mean Nisus Writer Classic (called just "Nisus Writer" at the time), which ran on pre-OSX Macs (eg: Mac System OS 9).

Are you now opening these Classic documents in Nisus Writer Pro (NWP) and that's when you see the image? It's possible that the linked text was embedded as a Mac PICT. If so, it may be that these PICT images are still holding your text (PICT is a format that mixes raster and vector data), but you would have to use another tool to extract such text. NWP itself does not directly handle decoding or drawing PICT images.

If you send us one of these files, we could take a look and see what you've got exactly.