Converting old Wintext documents to Nisus Writer?

[ctarbox]

Hello,

I work with a faculty member that has used Wintext for his Arabic documents for many years and am trying to convince him to switch to Nisus Writer. He is very concerned that he will not be able to convert the Wintext docs to Nisus Writer without have to re-input them all which he is totally against. Can anyone confirm whether or not this can be done.

Thanks in advance,
Cheryl Tarbox
Macintosh Support Specialist
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY

[Ruchama]

From my experience, the only way you would know for sure is by downloading the demo version and try it with a file the reflects the type of texts he is using. if it goes ok, all is well. if not - approach the nisus team and ask for help.

[ctarbox]

Thanks for the tip. I'll grab one of his files to work with and download the demo (Pro?) and report back as to what happens.

Cheryl

[Hamid]

Wintext has been discontinued for quite a long time. It uses its own file format which other apps cannot normally open.

It is still possible to convert Wintext files to Nisus Writer Classic or Nisus Writer Pro/Express to some extent.

IIRC a Wintext file can be saved as text from within the application and it will be saved with Arabic (Mac OS) character encoding which Nisus Writer Classic as well as Nisus Writer Pro/Express can read. However, formatting and footnotes will not be saved.

In Nisus Writer Pro/Express, Arabic Wintext files saved as text should be opened in the Open dialog with 'Arabic' applied in the 'Text Encoding' drop-down menu.
In Nisus Writer Classic, Arabic Wintext files saved as text can be opened in any way. The text will appear garbled. Then the entire garbled text should be selected and while holding down the Shift key an Arabic font such as Geeza should be applied to restore the Arabic text.


If Nisus Writer Classic is available on the same machine as Wintext, it is possible to open a Wintext file and copy and paste it directly on to an empty Nisus Writer Classic file. The text will appear garbled. It should be selected and while holding down the Shift key an Arabic font such as Geeza should be applied to restore the Arabic text.

Garbled text from Wintext:

PasteFrWintext.png (10.14 KiB) Viewed 7662 times

Text restored in NWC:

NWC.png (20.9 KiB) Viewed 7662 times

[martin]

I've never heard of Wintext, and Nisus Writer doesn't have any support for importing its file format. From what Hamid says, it sounds like you'll have to do some manual conversions to get the text into Nisus Writer (or any other word processor).

[Ruchama]

just in case this may be helpful, I attach this extract from this http://www.smi.uib.no/ksv/ArabicProgs.html link.
it may be useful to approach the makers of wintext to see whether they have a clever solution.