Lotus Word Pro files in Open Office?

I can't find anywhere where it says that Open Office will open Lotus WordPro files. In fact, there are a number of posts to various developement lists for Open Office and Abiword (another open source word processor) that say that they won't be able to open Lotus WordPro files because the file format isn't documented very well and therefor requires a lot of difficult reverse engineering.

If you have to exchange data with users using Lotus WordPro, you can work around this problem by asking them to save the document in RTF format which both Open Office and Abiword can handle just fine.

If these comments solved your problem, please consider closing this request as answered. You can find useful information on managing your support requests here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SupportRequests

If you are still having problems, let us know and we'll keep working on them.

Thanks-

Jim Jones

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:19:37 -0600, Jim Jones
<email address hidden> wrote:

> Support request #2168 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+ticket/2168
>
> Comment:
> I can't find anywhere where it says that Open Office will open Lotus
> WordPro files. In fact, there are a number of posts to various
> developement lists for Open Office and Abiword (another open source word
> processor) that say that they won't be able to open Lotus WordPro files
> because the file format isn't documented very well and therefor requires
> a lot of difficult reverse engineering.
>
> If you have to exchange data with users using Lotus WordPro, you can
> work around this problem by asking them to save the document in RTF
> format which both Open Office and Abiword can handle just fine.
>
>
> If these comments solved your problem, please consider closing this
> request as answered. You can find useful information on managing your
> support requests here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SupportRequests
>
> If you are still having problems, let us know and we'll keep working on
> them.
>
> Thanks-
>
> Jim Jones
>

The files in question were some documents produced with Word Pro some
years ago.
I got around the problem the long way - installing an old copy of Word Pro
on a Windows
box, printing off the documents (since for some reason Word Pro wouldn't
let me save
the documents in another format - probably in incompatibility between the
old version I
had and Win XP), then retyping them into OO Writer. Fortunately they
turned out to be
relatively straightforward text documents.

Al P.

My other suggestion was going to be to brute force it with the wonderful "strings" utility.

First, you'd have to install the binutils package. Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal:

sudo apt-get install binutils

The run strings against the file and capture it to a text file:

strings FileNameHere > stringsoutput.txt

Then open the stringsoutput.txt (or whatever you named it) in a word processor.

There will be a lot of garbage, but a lot of the text should be there as well. It is probably a toss up as to whether or not this would be more work than retyping it. I searched for some lwp files on the web ("test filetype:lpw" on Goggle) and this worked for the most part (still a lot of garbage to contend with).

Finally, another brute force option is to scan the documents and use Optical Character Recognition to try to redigitize the content. There are a number of OCR programs for Ubuntu/Linux including ocrad, clara, kooka, and gocr. Their effectiveness with mixed media content (pictures and text) is spotty by reports that I found on the web, but they are always improving. For text only documents, the results are better.

Anyway. I am glad you found a solution, sorry there wasn't a better Linux solution for you.

If you consider this request answered, please consider closing this ticket.

Good Luck. Nice to meet you.

Jim Jones

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:28:38 -0600, Jim Jones
<email address hidden> wrote:

> Support request #2168 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+ticket/2168
>
> Comment:
> My other suggestion was going to be to brute force it with the wonderful
> "strings" utility.
>
> First, you'd have to install the binutils package. Applications ->
> Accessories -> Terminal:
>
> sudo apt-get install binutils
>
> The run strings against the file and capture it to a text file:
>
> strings FileNameHere > stringsoutput.txt
>
> Then open the stringsoutput.txt (or whatever you named it) in a word
> processor.
>
> There will be a lot of garbage, but a lot of the text should be there as
> well. It is probably a toss up as to whether or not this would be more
> work than retyping it. I searched for some lwp files on the web ("test
> filetype:lpw" on Goggle) and this worked for the most part (still a lot
> of garbage to contend with).
>
> Finally, another brute force option is to scan the documents and use
> Optical Character Recognition to try to redigitize the content. There
> are a number of OCR programs for Ubuntu/Linux including ocrad, clara,
> kooka, and gocr. Their effectiveness with mixed media content (pictures
> and text) is spotty by reports that I found on the web, but they are
> always improving. For text only documents, the results are better.
>
> Anyway. I am glad you found a solution, sorry there wasn't a better
> Linux solution for you.
>
> If you consider this request answered, please consider closing this
> ticket.

I would, but am not sure how to.....

Al P.

>
> Good Luck. Nice to meet you.
>
> Jim Jones

--
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Information on managing requests including closing them as answered is available on this great Ubuntu wiki page:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SupportRequests

Just peruse through that (it has screenshots) and you should be able to close this ticket.

Jim Jones

resolved