Converting old Simple Text documents (.txt) to Rich Text Format (.rtf) so I can open them in Pages.

I do have an older iMac, but I haven't turned it on in about 5 years. It was the original iMac Intel with a Core Duo (Yonah). I went as far as I could with it as far as OS upgrades, so it's running Snow Leopard (MacOS X v10.6.8?). If it still runs I could see if I have any better luck, and if nothing else I could save them as RTF. Or possibly open them in that version of Pages, which I think was still part of Apple Works at the time, and then transfer them to a USB thumb drive and to my new MacBook Pro 16" with M1-Max... Now you talk about a jump from Medieval times to the Space Age...

Yeah, I think I will try the idea of starting up my old iMac. It may have the best chance, since it's running Snow Leopard, which is what, 5-7 OS upgrades back? Of course I may have to use the old Software Upgrade disk to start it up as I have long forgotten the password for that machine. Perhaps there's something to be said for pen & paper. After all, writers have been using that trustworthy method for thousands of years and you can still read the file... Unless of course it's a doctor's prescription, and then it was anybody's guess what the medication was.

I downloaded Libre Office and got the same results. More gibberish. And I guess that the thing that puzzles me the most is that Apple didn't include the ability to automatically convert simple text (.txt) documents into Rich Text Format (.rtf) when they replaced Simple Text with Text Edit. Or that Pages doesn't have the ability to open them. From the forum page on Simple Text I understood that this ability was included in the developer tools for Panther, but how long ago was that...

And I tried unsuccessfully to find the text/document version of a Graphic Converter type app, and Document Converter, as I said, is the closest thing, but even it is hit or miss.

This is the gibberish that I typically end up with. And that's by doing a Command-Open of the simple text document, which opens it in Text Edit, where it looks like this. Then I save it (convert it) to Rich Text Format.

I don't know if that helped. I opened Terminal, typed file, hit the space bar, then dragged the file into the window and hit return. I tried it a second time with another file and got a similar result. It merely seems to show the path to the file, but not any pertinent info about the file itself.

I am wondering if, based on the creation dates for these files, if some were created during the brief period I switched over to "The Dark Side". Between September of 2000 and April of 2002 I was in grad school. At the time I could not afford a Mac for classes, so I bought a Toshiba laptop running Windows 98. My primary apps were Word Perfect and Final Draft (I was pursuing a screenwriting degree). When I switched back to Mac I had the Mac version of Final Draft, so those files were accessible. However, I wonder if the others are either in a Word Perfect or Microsoft format, and that's why I can't access them. And I still have some older files that have (WN3) after the name, which would make them a Write Now 3.0 file - I really miss that app.