To convert it, I first opened and re-saved using Word 98[1] running on a QEMU-emulated Power Mac, at which point it opened in modern Word for Mac (viz., version 16.82).
The pictures were missing, however, with Word claiming "There is not enough memory or disk space to display or print the picture." (given 64 GB RAM with 30+ GB free at the time, I assume the actual problem is that Word no longer supports the PICT image format).
To restore the images, I used Acrobat (5.0.10) print-to-PDF in Word 98 to create a PDF, then extracted the three images to separate PDFs using (modern) Adobe Illustrator, preserving the original fonts, vector artwork, size, and exact bounding box of each image.
At this point, restoring the images was a simple matter of deleting the original images and dragging and dropping the PDF replacements from the Finder.
For comparison, here's the PDF created by Acrobat from Word 98 on the Power Mac
Did you attempt to extract the pictures so they could be converted directly by another program? Archive Team says that LibreOffice can read vector PICT files[1]. And then saved as SVG. Of course you still have the font problem if it has text. I hadn't thought of using PDF to preserve vectors, but of course it does, as well as embedding the fonts.
I did not expect to read about the LHC in such an 'old' document. I couldn't find (in the time I was willing to spend during work) when the LHC project started to this already be relevant in 1990 (20 years before it started, which is also longer than I would have guessed)
> That way I can see actual fonts, font sizes and layout to confirm how the document should have looked.
Or you would if you had the original fonts. Word 4.0 was released for System 6 with support as far back as System 3.2. Fonts at that time had separate screen and printer files for the different output resolutions. If you're missing the printer font it'll print a scaled (using nearest-neighbor) rendering of the screen font. If you're missing the screen font it'll substitute the system font. (Geneva by default, as seen in the screenshot.)
In this case, only the well-known Palatino and Courier typefaces are needed. But LibreOffice substituted Times New Roman even though I have Palatino Linotype installed.
This is probably because the (internal) name of Palatino Linotype is "PalatinoLinotype" (for the version shipped with Windows) or "PalatinoLTStd" (for the Adobe OpenType version).
In the absence of a hard-coded special case, font matching based on common prefixes could easily match something inappropriate, such as — taking the first example I see on my machine — mapping "Lucida" to "LucidaConsole", when almost any proportional sans-serif font would arguably be a better match for the document author's design intent.
Then again, even exact name matches provide no guarantees. For example, Apple has shipped two fonts (internally) named NewYork: the TrueType conversion of Susan Kare's 1983 bitmap design for the original Macintosh, and an unrelated design released in 2019.
One underappreciated (though mentioned) hero in this little saga is the venerable file(1) command.
proposal: Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0
It's so incredibly useful and so easily overlooked. I almost reflexively reach out to it when I'm curious about a file and the information it returns is just sufficient to satiate my curiosity and be useful.
I have cursed so many times in the past when I sat in front of a work computer that ran Windows and didn’t have this tool easily available. (Later on, WSL made life easier, but now I’m luckily nearly Windows-free.)
LibreOffice opens it right up. It's support for old document file formats is really excellent. I keep it around for just this purpose. https://imgur.com/a/JENgq6V
But I also love using BasiliskII and InfiniteMac emulators!
> LibreOffice opens it right up. It's support for old document formats is really excellent.
Yes, the OP also mentions that LibreOffice opens it.
...but they also point out with LibreOffice that "Although there's something weird about the margins and there are other formatting problems." - which is also apparent in your screenshot? Certainly that level support for such an old proprietary format is pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd class it as "really excellent" with those issues.
Give QEMU a try — current versions do a great job emulating a Power Mac, able to run the most recent PowerPC versions of both classic Mac OS (9.2.2) and Mac OS X (10.5).
Well, StarOffice already existed back then. Now I wonder whether LibreOffice still has some early '90s third party format parsing code inside, or some reverse engineered compatibility and conversion code from much later Word version actually does the job.
Yeah, I stopped reading the article, downloaded the file, the only word processor is in Libre Office. It seemed to work fine so I didn't know what the issue was. Then I read the article and kept scrolling to the end where the author finally uses LibreOffice and it opens mostly okay.
As a testament to Microsoft's backwards compatibility: the file opened mostly fine in the Windows version of Word (version 2401), and the layout seems to be identical to the PDF of the article. It did block the file format by default but that was easy enough to allow.
The graphics did not open however, due to a missing graphics filter for the Microsoft Word Picture format. Seem it's been deprecated for a while now but Word 2003 should be able to open it? Which is old, but not that old not to run on modern systems.
Installed a copy of Word 2003, document opened flawlessly immediately with default settings. Saving it from there converted it to a modern .doc which I could open with Office 365 and convert to PDF etc.
I think the moral of the story is that the Windows Office team seems to spend a bit more time on backwards compatibility.
I am deeply disappointed that a company like Microsoft doesn't make a point of Microsoft Word being able to open any document created by any version of Word, no matter how ancient it is. I think they have the social/historical/economical responsibility of doing so.
If they are worried about vulnerabilities in the old parsing code, move it to an external process, run it under isolation in a sandbox to spit out a newer readable version on the fly, but don't eliminate this capability from the software.
EDIT: zokier pointed out to me that the desktop version of Word opens the file fine, it is only the web version that doesn't. So, consider this post void.
EDIT 2: Well it opens the document, but is not able to display or print the embedded graphics, it seems.
Many old formats were essentially just binary dumps of memory, or something not far removed. Documenting the formats was not a standard. Yes, I agree that there is a social responsibility, but having worked in digital archiving I can tell you that the olden days were really, really messy. No, really.
If you wanted exactly what would have been printed, on the emulator running Word for Mac 4.0 you should be able to install a print queue that can generate a .ps (Postscript) file, which would could be converted to PDF.
Or Acrobat may be available for that old of an OS and would have a virtual print driver to go directly to PDF.
LibreOffice is amazing, beside being able to open many document formats, it can run headless and has command line options which allow automating some tasks such as converting format that would not be possible otherwise.
This rises a potential problem, often underrated by companies: some have backups with infinite retention.
It is common to have backups with retention of 10 years, some may have 20 years for legal reasons… but the majority of people don't understand the difference between "readable" and "usable".
Of course, it depends on the data… And there are companies backing up whole virtual machines with infinite retention, believing to be able to run them: it is hard enough to restore a vSphere 5.x machine on a brand new vSphere 8, I really don't understand this waste of space.
If you backup all, you can sort later, and even eventually never. It costs 1 USD per month at Google Cloud to store 1TB of data.
At this price it's not worth sorting, when one single devops costs 100 USD+ per hour, not including the opportunity cost of not working on something more productive (and less boring for the developer).
Then X years after the company is acquired, or sufficient time has lapsed, you can delete / drop the data without sorting.
Regarding virtual machines, if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it, and again, it's not worth taking a risk to lose data to potentially save 10 USD per month, which is similar to one developer taking one beer extra at a team event.
I'm surprised he didn't try an intermediate version of Word -- not the original Word 4.0 for Mac, but not the current online version of Word either.
I had a lot of old Word 4.0 for Mac files at one point, and remember some point in the late 1990's or early 2000's opening them all up in a version of Word for Windows, and then re-saving them in a more up-to-date Word format. I believe there was an official converter tool Microsoft provided as a free add-on or an optional install component -- it wouldn't open the "ancient" Word formats otherwise.
There's definitely going to be a chain here of 1 or 2 intermediate versions of Word that should be able to open the document perfectly and get it into a modern Word format, I should think -- and I'm curious what the exact versions are. (Although as other people point out, if you don't need to edit it, then exporting it as PostScript in Word 4.0 and converting it to PDF works fine too.)
As I've discovered while playing with this document and reading this thread:
Current Word for Mac blocks opening the file under discussion, with no obvious workarounds.
Current Word for Windows will only open the file with non-default security settings, and won't render the images at all.
Per Microsoft, PICT image support was removed from all versions of Word for Windows in August 2019[1].
The current version of Word for Mac fails to render the images with a misleading error message ("There is not enough memory or disk space to display or print the picture.").
As for fonts, they should render fine assuming you have matching fonts, where "matching" is defined by some application- or OS-specific algorithm, e.g., a post above indicates LibreOffice (on Linux?) substituting Times New Roman for Palatino when Palatino Linotype was avilable, whereas current Word on Windows 11 has no problem rendering Palatino as Palatino, presumably using the copy of Palatino Linotype installed with the OS.
Finally, if matching spacing (character, word, and line), line breaks, and page breaks is important, you should definitely open the document using as close a version of Word as possible with the exact fonts used when creating the document installed.
Oh, and hope the original author didn't rely on printer fonts without matching scalable screen fonts available, or else you're probably SOL unless your goal is printing to a sufficiently similar printer.
Interestingly, the latest and greatest version (desktop app via Office365) of Microsoft Word on Mac appears to know what it is but refuses to open it.
If you drag the file onto Word, it launches a dialogue box telling you "proposal uses a file type that is blocked from opening in this version" along with a link to the supporting page on the Microsoft website[1].
Extremely interesting and thank you for doing this. I feel strongly that this goes to show just how important preserving historical software and emulation is. I have dabbled myself with old Windows 3.1 software for this very reason. We really, truly are going to have a period where web application driven software just disappears and we wont easily have this retro computing view of these decades in a short time from now.
Somehow the author doesnt recognize that emulation is a legitimate answer to this question. Yes he was able to open the document, by using the original software on a highly accurate emulation of the original system. Everything beyond that point is a different question: can we get it inside of a modern word processor.
Today's historic working documents will mostly be SaaS hosted documents in systems like Google Docs, Notion, etc. In the future nobody will be able to open them. They won't exist, and the software won't exist, and there will be no way to restore it since the software is SaaS that can't be emulated or even installed anywhere.
Tragically, Postscript support has been largely removed from MacOS now. Apparently the language was weird enough that supporting it made some (in)security hacks possible. I guess I'm old ! I remember first finding out about it in 1986 when is very "leet". Postscript printers were big $.
I say tragically because Postscript was pretty key in making DTP as compelling as it used to be, which kind of saved the Mac in terms of being the "killer app" for it.
I think you may be able to run some kind of postscript support in some tool from Adobe, or even Ghostscript. And probably, the newer software is better, but it's sad that you can't view a postscript file on macOS out of the box now.
I wonder if it would be a viable business to keep running versions of computers going back say 40 years and offering to recover and convert files for people. (Just getting stuff off floppy disks and Zip drives might be useful)
Somewhat off-topic, but I remember Word for Windows 6.0 would take considerable time (like a minute for a 10 page document on my AM386DX/40) to reflow paragraphs across page-breaks (trying to handle widows, orphans &c). If I made an edit to the first page and hit print before it was done, I would end up with a printed document that contained either duplicated or dropped lines at page boundaries.
[+] [-] jasomill|2 years ago|reply
https://jasomill.at/proposal.docx
To convert it, I first opened and re-saved using Word 98[1] running on a QEMU-emulated Power Mac, at which point it opened in modern Word for Mac (viz., version 16.82).
The pictures were missing, however, with Word claiming "There is not enough memory or disk space to display or print the picture." (given 64 GB RAM with 30+ GB free at the time, I assume the actual problem is that Word no longer supports the PICT image format).
To restore the images, I used Acrobat (5.0.10) print-to-PDF in Word 98 to create a PDF, then extracted the three images to separate PDFs using (modern) Adobe Illustrator, preserving the original fonts, vector artwork, size, and exact bounding box of each image.
At this point, restoring the images was a simple matter of deleting the original images and dragging and dropping the PDF replacements from the Finder.
For comparison, here's the PDF created by Acrobat from Word 98 on the Power Mac
https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word98.pdf
and here's a PDF created by modern Word running on macOS Sonoma
https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word16.82.pdf
[1] https://archive.org/details/ms-word98-special-edition
[+] [-] whoopdedo|2 years ago|reply
[1] http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT
[+] [-] jasomill|2 years ago|reply
https://jasomill.at/Clippy.png
[+] [-] animal_spirits|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ragebol|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoopdedo|2 years ago|reply
Or you would if you had the original fonts. Word 4.0 was released for System 6 with support as far back as System 3.2. Fonts at that time had separate screen and printer files for the different output resolutions. If you're missing the printer font it'll print a scaled (using nearest-neighbor) rendering of the screen font. If you're missing the screen font it'll substitute the system font. (Geneva by default, as seen in the screenshot.)
In this case, only the well-known Palatino and Courier typefaces are needed. But LibreOffice substituted Times New Roman even though I have Palatino Linotype installed.
[+] [-] jasomill|2 years ago|reply
In the absence of a hard-coded special case, font matching based on common prefixes could easily match something inappropriate, such as — taking the first example I see on my machine — mapping "Lucida" to "LucidaConsole", when almost any proportional sans-serif font would arguably be a better match for the document author's design intent.
Then again, even exact name matches provide no guarantees. For example, Apple has shipped two fonts (internally) named NewYork: the TrueType conversion of Susan Kare's 1983 bitmap design for the original Macintosh, and an unrelated design released in 2019.
[+] [-] jgrahamc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noufalibrahim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpach|2 years ago|reply
I have cursed so many times in the past when I sat in front of a work computer that ran Windows and didn’t have this tool easily available. (Later on, WSL made life easier, but now I’m luckily nearly Windows-free.)
[+] [-] msephton|2 years ago|reply
But I also love using BasiliskII and InfiniteMac emulators!
[+] [-] sigspec|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karellen|2 years ago|reply
Yes, the OP also mentions that LibreOffice opens it.
...but they also point out with LibreOffice that "Although there's something weird about the margins and there are other formatting problems." - which is also apparent in your screenshot? Certainly that level support for such an old proprietary format is pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd class it as "really excellent" with those issues.
[+] [-] jasomill|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogurechny|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] graemep|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vdaea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lizknope|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markus92|2 years ago|reply
The graphics did not open however, due to a missing graphics filter for the Microsoft Word Picture format. Seem it's been deprecated for a while now but Word 2003 should be able to open it? Which is old, but not that old not to run on modern systems.
[+] [-] markus92|2 years ago|reply
I think the moral of the story is that the Windows Office team seems to spend a bit more time on backwards compatibility.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elzbardico|2 years ago|reply
If they are worried about vulnerabilities in the old parsing code, move it to an external process, run it under isolation in a sandbox to spit out a newer readable version on the fly, but don't eliminate this capability from the software.
EDIT: zokier pointed out to me that the desktop version of Word opens the file fine, it is only the web version that doesn't. So, consider this post void.
EDIT 2: Well it opens the document, but is not able to display or print the embedded graphics, it seems.
[+] [-] larsrc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pompino|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullindividual|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdw|2 years ago|reply
Or Acrobat may be available for that old of an OS and would have a virtual print driver to go directly to PDF.
[+] [-] chrisfinazzo|2 years ago|reply
Or, if you prefer to do more tweaking yourself, dive into the Ghostscript deep end :)
https://www.ghostscript.com
[+] [-] detourdog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrahamc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorfsmay|2 years ago|reply
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...
https://opensource.com/article/21/3/libreoffice-command-line
[+] [-] scaglio|2 years ago|reply
It is common to have backups with retention of 10 years, some may have 20 years for legal reasons… but the majority of people don't understand the difference between "readable" and "usable".
Of course, it depends on the data… And there are companies backing up whole virtual machines with infinite retention, believing to be able to run them: it is hard enough to restore a vSphere 5.x machine on a brand new vSphere 8, I really don't understand this waste of space.
[+] [-] rvnx|2 years ago|reply
At this price it's not worth sorting, when one single devops costs 100 USD+ per hour, not including the opportunity cost of not working on something more productive (and less boring for the developer).
Then X years after the company is acquired, or sufficient time has lapsed, you can delete / drop the data without sorting.
Regarding virtual machines, if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it, and again, it's not worth taking a risk to lose data to potentially save 10 USD per month, which is similar to one developer taking one beer extra at a team event.
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
So the waste of space is more of an administrative character than a waste of disk space.
[+] [-] arnaudsm|2 years ago|reply
I use markdown, plaintext and png for all the documents I need to store long term.
Even if these formats disappear, I could trivially reimplement my own parser.
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 years ago|reply
I had a lot of old Word 4.0 for Mac files at one point, and remember some point in the late 1990's or early 2000's opening them all up in a version of Word for Windows, and then re-saving them in a more up-to-date Word format. I believe there was an official converter tool Microsoft provided as a free add-on or an optional install component -- it wouldn't open the "ancient" Word formats otherwise.
There's definitely going to be a chain here of 1 or 2 intermediate versions of Word that should be able to open the document perfectly and get it into a modern Word format, I should think -- and I'm curious what the exact versions are. (Although as other people point out, if you don't need to edit it, then exporting it as PostScript in Word 4.0 and converting it to PDF works fine too.)
[+] [-] jasomill|2 years ago|reply
Current Word for Mac blocks opening the file under discussion, with no obvious workarounds.
Current Word for Windows will only open the file with non-default security settings, and won't render the images at all.
Per Microsoft, PICT image support was removed from all versions of Word for Windows in August 2019[1].
The current version of Word for Mac fails to render the images with a misleading error message ("There is not enough memory or disk space to display or print the picture.").
As for fonts, they should render fine assuming you have matching fonts, where "matching" is defined by some application- or OS-specific algorithm, e.g., a post above indicates LibreOffice (on Linux?) substituting Times New Roman for Palatino when Palatino Linotype was avilable, whereas current Word on Windows 11 has no problem rendering Palatino as Palatino, presumably using the copy of Palatino Linotype installed with the OS.
Finally, if matching spacing (character, word, and line), line breaks, and page breaks is important, you should definitely open the document using as close a version of Word as possible with the exact fonts used when creating the document installed.
Oh, and hope the original author didn't rely on printer fonts without matching scalable screen fonts available, or else you're probably SOL unless your goal is printing to a sufficiently similar printer.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/support-for-pict-...
[+] [-] traceroute66|2 years ago|reply
If you drag the file onto Word, it launches a dialogue box telling you "proposal uses a file type that is blocked from opening in this version" along with a link to the supporting page on the Microsoft website[1].
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/error-filename-us...
[+] [-] worik|2 years ago|reply
"blocked"?
That sounds like Microsoft has some IP problems with their old software.
[+] [-] rietta|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzdt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|2 years ago|reply
(also "autoSpaceLikeWord95" in case anyone shares that specific brainworm with me and is Ctrl+Fing for it)
[1] https://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-p...
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtotheh|2 years ago|reply
I say tragically because Postscript was pretty key in making DTP as compelling as it used to be, which kind of saved the Mac in terms of being the "killer app" for it.
I think you may be able to run some kind of postscript support in some tool from Adobe, or even Ghostscript. And probably, the newer software is better, but it's sad that you can't view a postscript file on macOS out of the box now.
[+] [-] bilsbie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sembiance|2 years ago|reply
Here is the converted PDF: https://smallpdf.com/result#r=091f20f23de353fac21376a3a49a60...
[+] [-] aidenn0|2 years ago|reply