Converting Appleworks 6.2.3 documents created on an iMac OS 9.0.4. to Pages on my new MacBook Pro OS 10.8.3.

On OS X 10.9.2, the LibreOffice 4.2.3.3 command-line (Terminal) syntax for converting a pure AppleWorks 6.2.9 WP document to the following formats:

MS Word .docx

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to docx:"MS Word 2007 XML" --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx.cwk

PDF

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx.cwk

A couple of paragraphs of the conversion result shown in Pages v5.2 from the output Word document.

And the following is a .docx from an MS Windows AppleWorks v5 document conversion, changing only the alice cwk with lorem_v5_win.cwk:

If you have mixed text and graphics, your mileage will vary on the quality of the output.

Hi,

Yes this looks good, however after(?) my upgrade to Mavericks a lot (not all) of those AppleWorks Documents have dropped their file extensions, the have a dark grery icon with the word "exec" in it.

How to convert those if they don't even have a file extension?

with best regards,

Omar K N

Stockholm, Sweden

Hello Omar,

you can use the previous command lines even if the file have no extension, ie. just do not add the .cwk extension in the last parameter: the original file name, as in:

MS Word .docx

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to docx:"MS Word 2007 XML" --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx

PDF

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx

Of course, this suppose that you know which files are AppleWorks files...

Hi fosnola,

I'm running the line from above:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --invisible --nologo --convert-to odt NN-file

to convert the NN-file, which doesn't have an extension, but this doesn't do anything.

With the .cwk files it worked!

Any idea?

with best regards,

Omar K N

Stockholm, Sweden

This is odd, ie. I just try with a file without extension:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --invisible --nologo --convert-to odt ~/Cours/nisusZip/4.0/Notes4

convert /Users/XXX/Cours/nisusZip/4.0/Notes4 -> /Users/XXX/tmp/test/Notes4.odt using OpenDocument Text Flat XML

( and this works ).

Do you check if LibreOffice can read the NN-file file ?

Notes:

- if the problem is just an extension problem, you can also do something like that:

cp NN-file /tmp/NN-file.cwk

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --invisible --nologo --convert-to odt /tmp/NN-file.cwk

- the command line given by VikingOSX is better than mine...

Hi fosnola,

There might be something wrong with LibreOffice itself.

What I found is this - for adding .odt in a given folder:

[code]

find . -type f -exec mv '{}' '{}'.odt \;

[/code]

(Explanation: this recursively finds all files (-type f) starting from the current directory (.) and applies the move command (mv) to each of them. Note also the quotes around {}, so that filenames with spaces (and even newlines...) are properly handled.)

VikingOSX only deals with MS Word .docx not with .odt, his line would have to be adapted, which I could not.

[code]

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to docx:"MS Word 2007 XML" --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx.cwk

[/code]

And the above find ... line works for files without extension.

/okn

Hello,

yes, this code will add .odt to each file name,

find . -type f -exec mv {}{}.odt \;

in fact, if you use bash, ... , you don't need to add the different '

To update the VikingOSX, you can do:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to odt --outdir ~/Desktop ~/Cours/nisusZip/4.0/Notes4

( which tries to convert the file ~/Co.../Notes4 in odt and put the result on the desktop, ie. in ~/Desktop )

Thank you.

BTW now doubts came up in my amateur mind as to whether adding an extension such as .odt by itself is equal to a conversion of the file into .odt?

Because

1. those odt-files take a bit long for LibreOffice to open.

2. When searching in those .odt files, the Terminal tells me: "Binary file".

(I was searching with grep -h foo * )

What do you think?

with best regards,

Omar K N

Stockholm, Sweden

You can convert them without a file extension. If you are using the LibreOffice command-line examples in the Terminal, you just specify the extension-less document as the last argument. The converted form may/may not appear with a proper document extension. If it doesn't, just add the correct extension in the Finder or Terminal.

I just opened an AppleWorks WP document without an extension in LibreOffice without issue. As it was an AppleWorks 6 document, it also opened perfectly in Pages ’09 v4.3.

Hello,

oktan wrote:

BTW now doubts came up in my amateur mind as to whether adding an extension such as .odt by itself is equal to a conversion of the file into .odt?

this only changes the file names, but the files' contents remain the same, ie. the files remain AppleWorks' files...

Note:

if you want to speed up the conversions, you can download mwawOSX.zip ( in https://sourceforge.net/projects/libmwaw/files/ ) and type something like (on a single line):

~/mwawOSX/bin/mwaw2odf ~/Cours/clarisWorks/v6/lesson.plans.digital.S1.cwk ~/Cours/clarisWorks/v6/lesson.plans.digital.S1.odt

this will call directly the filter used by LibreOffice to convert ~/...lesson.plans.digital.S1.cwk in ~/...lesson.plans.digital.S1.odt ( if this is possible ).

Thank you fosnola,

This worked for me - for a specific file.

But when I wanted to convert all cwk files in the folder I got this message:

okns-imac:_MYFOLDER okn$ /Applications/Utilities/mwawOSX/bin/mwaw2odf *.cwk *.odt

Usage: /Applications/Utilities/mwawOSX/bin/mwaw2odf [OPTION] <Mac Document> [file.odf]

tries to convert a Mac Document in a odf file.

If given the result is stored in file.odf,

if not, the result is sent to stdout.

Options:

-h: Shows this help message

-v: Output /Applications/Utilities/mwawOSX/bin/mwaw2odf version

-x: Only returns the extension type

Note:

you can find the list of recognized formats at

http://sourceforge.net/p/libmwaw/wiki/Home/

(at least the list of formats recognized by the lattest version of libmwaw)

Any idea how do batch this?

with best regards,

Omar K N

Stockholm, Sweden

…however if batch conversion is not possible in the above case, then this (file by file) is good enough!

/okn

Hello,

yes, batch conversion is not implemented :-~ , but with a shell script, you can call it on each file that need to be converted :-)

Did it for me, too!

LibreOffice v4.3.* now opens AppleWorks documents with gibberish, where the same documents opened reasonably well in v4.2.5.2 (last of the 4.2 series).