MacWrite II to plain text converter

Background

Some years ago, I gave up my old Macintosh Classic and bought a PC and installed Linux on that instead. In all, a much nicer environment, but this change also meant that I suddenly had lots of documents that I could no longer read. On the Mac I had been using MacWrite II from Claris for a couple of years. Of course there was no Linux program available that could read MacWrite II files. Converting all the hundreds of files I had by opening them in MacWrite II and saving them as plain text wasn't a very good option either, since it meant I had to go through each single file on the now rather sluggish Mac.

Instead I started looking at how the MacWrite II file format worked and tried to create a Perl script that would read a MacWrite II file and output the text in a more Linux-friendly format.

Download

MacWriteII2text.tar.gz
The Perl script to convert MacWrite II files to plain text and documentation about the file format. All the files below are included in this file.
MacWriteII.html
A compilation of my current knowledge about the MacWrite II file format. Any information you might have that can add to my understanding of the file format is very welcome.
Binn-Erker.MacWriteII
A sample MacWrite II file (with text in Swedish).
NEWS
Changes since the previous version.

Problems

The script will fail to find the beginning of the text in some files.
No attempt is made to preserve any of the formatting information. This probably shouldn't be too difficult.
Headers, footers and footnotes are ignored. Footnotes are detected in the text and their position indicated in the output but the text is lost.

History

2000-08-20: Release of version 0.0.1. The code does pretty much the same things as before, but the file format documentation is much improved.
2000-01-21: I write a short note on freshmeat.net that version 0.0.0 is available. This is still more or less the same code as the first public release back in March of 1997, but with better documentation of the file format (including some parts that are documented but not implemented).
1997-12-03: Sean Crist finds my old comp.lang.perl.modules post and writes me since he is also interested in deciphering the MacWrite II file format (though for different reasons). We begin corresponding for a while and manage to figure out quite a lot about how the file format works. There are still lots of things that are unknown, though.
1997-03-31: I post some questions about how to create a Perl module to comp.lang.perl-modules and also mention that I have the first version of MacWriteII2iso available for download.

This page is maintained by Hans Persson (unicorn@lysator.liu.se). Last modified .