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Greek WS2K--how to get to Windows Word

Started by tubastuff, November 10, 2009, 04:08:36 PM

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tubastuff

I've got an interesting situation here.  I've got some files that were produced with Wordstar 2000 (1.0) under DOS using Codepage 737 (Greek) mapping.  I need to get the files to a Word-compatible format.

I can use Star Exchange to get to an RTF file, but that's where I stumble.  The RTF encoding uses escaped hex codes for the Greek characters (e.g. \'9a) and not the characters themselves.  Windows does not support CP737, but rather Windows 1253 for Greek, which has a very different character mapping.

Short of writing a program to find and translate the escaped RTF characters, how can I get to a Windows Word-compatible format?

tubastuff

Follow-up:

I was able to do the conversion, but it's not simple.  I wrote two small programs--one to scan an RTF file for escaped characters (those with value 128 and over) and convert them to their 8-bit character representation.  Then using one of the character set translation programs available on the web, I translated from CP737 to Windows 1253 character set.

Next, the second program, which translates characters having a value of over 128 back to RTF-escaped characters was applied.

Finally, the first two lines in the RTF file that specify the character set and encoding were replaced with ones specifying that Windows 1253 is to be used. 

The results look fine and the process can be batched, so it isn't bad if you have a bunch of files.