5 ms·

Yeah, that’s why you need Word 2003 for the images, it’s a deprecated format full of security holes I guess.

giancarlostoro 3y ago
Ah… yeah I was wondering why they would deprecate an image format at all. My understanding is that Word in the old days serialized what was in memory, maybe that was a little too exploitable with images? Not sure just curious not even sure where to look that one up honestly.
- zokier 3y ago
  Digging through the files a bit I think the images are in PICT format which is very specific to Macs (the original ones). Its not surprising that modern Word doesn't support those that well as they are actually somewhat complicated kinda-vector image format. I am surprised that even Word 2003 implemented PICT on Windows.
  - ogurechny 3y ago
    It's not “kinda-vector”, it's a metafile format for QuickDraw operations (Windows did the same later with WMF, which was a list of GDI operations). http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT Imagemagick supports it. What's more important, QuickDraw source is available, so not only we can have “some” conversion, we can also reason about its correctness (to some extent — according to comments, it's from 1982-1985). https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour... Extracting raw embedded PICT files from the document and working with them would be the best way to get proper charts. To see what appeared on paper, we can direct emulated system output to an emulated printer, or capture the PostScript commands and rasterize them at the resolution that was used by device available to the author. It is well known that Word for Windows stored last used printer settings in the document, so it could be the same for files produced by Mac version. (M-hm, it says “Laserwriter” at 0x10097. Maybe they all do.) Because Microsoft made the most popular document editor for both Windows and Mac, they had to deal with interoperability of two versions of their own software. Supporting WMF/EMF on Mac meant they had to drag GDI implementation along with Office (luckily, the reference could be grabbed from their colleagues). Supporting PICT on Windows meant they had to re-implement QuickDraw primitives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/office-98-built-for-the-mac-from-the-ground-up/ https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/office-98-built-for-th... It is totally possible that Office applications used built-in PICT parser even on Mac to make things simple, and not rely on 15 years of compatibility layers in the system.

Ah… yeah I was wondering why they would deprecate an image format at all. My understanding is that Word in the old days serialized what was in memory, maybe that was a little too exploitable with images? Not sure just curious not even sure where to look that one up honestly.

zokier 3y ago
Digging through the files a bit I think the images are in PICT format which is very specific to Macs (the original ones). Its not surprising that modern Word doesn't support those that well as they are actually somewhat complicated kinda-vector image format. I am surprised that even Word 2003 implemented PICT on Windows.
- ogurechny 3y ago
  It's not “kinda-vector”, it's a metafile format for QuickDraw operations (Windows did the same later with WMF, which was a list of GDI operations). http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT Imagemagick supports it. What's more important, QuickDraw source is available, so not only we can have “some” conversion, we can also reason about its correctness (to some extent — according to comments, it's from 1982-1985). https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour... Extracting raw embedded PICT files from the document and working with them would be the best way to get proper charts. To see what appeared on paper, we can direct emulated system output to an emulated printer, or capture the PostScript commands and rasterize them at the resolution that was used by device available to the author. It is well known that Word for Windows stored last used printer settings in the document, so it could be the same for files produced by Mac version. (M-hm, it says “Laserwriter” at 0x10097. Maybe they all do.) Because Microsoft made the most popular document editor for both Windows and Mac, they had to deal with interoperability of two versions of their own software. Supporting WMF/EMF on Mac meant they had to drag GDI implementation along with Office (luckily, the reference could be grabbed from their colleagues). Supporting PICT on Windows meant they had to re-implement QuickDraw primitives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/office-98-built-for-the-mac-from-the-ground-up/ https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/office-98-built-for-th... It is totally possible that Office applications used built-in PICT parser even on Mac to make things simple, and not rely on 15 years of compatibility layers in the system.