Wordwise to Rich Text Format translator

A friend of mine after many years doggedly sticking to his BBC Model B finally succumbed and bought a PC. If he needed to use any of the material held in his Wordwise files on the PC his intention was to save these as plain text then load this into new wordprocessor documents on the PC. His first problem was transferring the files, this was simply solved by obtaining copies of the Kermit file transfer program for both the PC and BBC then making up a suitable serial cable.

Many years ago I had written a rudimentary translator to convert files in Interleaf format to RTF in order that documents written on UNIX workstations (by development staff) could be re-used on Apple Macintosh computers (by requirements engineering staff). Still having the notes to hand I set out to produce a similar translator for Wordwise as I felt this would save my friend having to recreate the layout of his original documents and would be some fun to write.

Having at the time a copy of Borland C++ v4.0 on a PC loaded with Windows 3.11 it was in this environment I created the application. Although I built the target for a W32 environment I have one small bug in that each time I close the application when running under Windows 95 (or higher) it crashes, as the translation works OK regardless of this so I haven't worried about finding this bug.

Upgrading to Borland C++ v5.0 prompted me to dust this one down and finally implement conversion of whole directories (the code ain't elegant but it works). I also discovered some time ago that if the application is built on Windows 95 the crash bug goes away?

Documentation courtesy of . Source code also available in a zip archive file.