useful tools for useless projects

Maybe the project won't be so useless after all, but it seems like an enormous amount of work for doubtful gain. I've had a drawer-full of - now that they're all neatly stacked I can measure the stacks, and there's over 350 of them, gadzooks - 3.5 floppy disks for, judging by the latest dates on the files, some 15 years now, and I've finally finished going through them all, slipping them into a portable drive attached by USB to my computer, reading the directories, and saving the files I might need that I never transferred over to my hard drive before.

Why I had so many disks relates to computer-management history it would be tedious to get into, but I was relieved to find many of the disks empty, which means - I think - that I copied and deleted the files onto a hard drive at some earlier point. But why I didn't cross off and discard the disks at that point I don't know.

Next problem. Many of the text files are in WordStar, a word processing program I used up until some time in the early 2000s. Many of the WordStar files are easily readable as text files in notepad.exe (which is what Windows insists on using if they have a .txt extension anyway). There are WS-specific tags, like HTML tags but not the same, which I can deal with; looking at the files I even begin to remember the codes. Some files have formatting kibble at the beginning and end which can be ignored. It's the ones that are text-justified that I have to worry about, and that includes most of the files I used for Mythprint, especially when we were still using raw WS files for layout before 1987. WS's method for justifying was to substitute some high-value code for the last character of each word to indicate the amount of space to be left; this turns the file into a translated-into-Lower-Slobbovian gibberish that reads like this:

C.S® Lewió apologizeä yearó lateò foò thå <169>needlesó  obscurity<170¾ iî hió firsô booë oæ proså fiction¬ Thå  Pilgrim'ó Regress®

It'd be possible to figure out the intended characters painfully one by one, especially if you wrote the file as I did that one. But I'd prefer to convert the files.

That means finding a file conversion program. And after reading too many web pages with cryptic or unfollowable instructions, that direct you to download this from some unspecified place, and then use it to get that, and then extract something else from it and place it in some unspecified directory and what not, I was willing to pay $95 for a program if I could actually just download it and it worked.

And it does. So if you're in need of file conversion, I can happily recommend such a program by the title of FileMerlin. (Auspicious name.) It has a free demo version that downloads without a fuss, but which introduces typos into the output so they're not usable as final copy, but that does mean you can test the program as many times as you want before you buy it. And when you do buy it, there's no additional download: it just disables the typo feature. The interface is a little box allowing file-manager searches for the input file and output location, and to specify the program format of both files, and there you are.