[TonyRado]

I'll give one point to anyone who can reasonably justify the placement of this thread in some other forum, and ten points to whomever best answers the question

I have whole a bunch of files on floppies that are saved as ASCII documents. Each one is approximately 100-200 pages long. I'd like to save them (each as a separate file) to my HD with the following requirements:

(A) The files need to preserve their original formatting. Proper page breaks are crucial!;
(B) The files will NOT be written to, but need to be readable by both Macs and PeeCees;
(C) The files need to have 'text search' capability.

This is a huge project for me, and I appreciate all of your input. Thanks!

[istallion]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but doesn't ASCII support all those requirements? If you want to prevent people from changing them, set the permissions to read only.

[RAzaRazor]

PDFs really are searchable, but you have to have the correct version of Acrobat reader.

When you download it, it asks if you want the smaller version, or the larger version that supports searching. Obviously most people go for the quick version.

I use Acrobat to search electronic versions of our print catalogs (80+ Pages) at work. It does it just fine.

I'm assuming that these are legal documents you are talking about, so to preserve all the formatting, you just need to "Print" them to a PDF file with the right page size.

[TonyRado]

Hrm, thanks for info. It seems as though all of the documents that I previously thought were ASCII are in fact ".txt". I think this is good. Isn't this another 'universal' type of document?

The problem I'm having now is getting ALL of these .txt documents off of the floppies. It's sooooooooooooo slow. I found a directory on the PeeCee that has a whole bunch of the them, but unfortunately, someone already converted them to .wpd documents.
So, after bumping them over to my Ti, I now have to throw each of them in MacLink to convert them 'back' to .txt

So, is .txt a "good choice" for my ultimate document type?

[ghporter]

Not all text files are created equal. A ".txt" file is generally universal, but that isn't guaranteed. On the other hand, much effort has been put to making "PDF" files really universal.

One rather large benefit of using Adobe Acrobat to generate a PDF from your original file is that it doesn't matter what the file's format is-all that matters is how it will print out. The distiller program looks like a printer driver to your computer, so what you see on the screen is what you get in the file. This is true for Macs, PCs, Linux, Solaris, etc., ad nauseum.

[TonyRado]

Gah! The problem that I can't seem to overcome is that the page breaks are not in my documents. I tried translating the .wpd document to both "Text Windows Document with line breaks" and (2) just plain "Text Window Document" - but nothing is working. I mean, should I converting to rich text or something?

[TonyRado]

Ummm, I must REALLY be missing something here. So far I have translated about 20 documents to .txt

I opened their folder in the finder in 'list view' and typed a word in the search bar that is supposed to be in a number of them. I got NO RESULTS! WTF, are these documents just not 'indexed' yet?!



UPDATE:
OK, I tried converting from .wpd to "Rich Text RTF Window Document" and now my page breaks are preserved!
But, I STILL can't do a text search from within my finder. Does anyone know what the heck is going on here? Thanks!