4 ms·
For anyone interested, here's the document in modern Word format, with all vector artwork and fonts intact: https://jasomill.at/proposal.docx https://jasomill.
by jasomill 3y ago
For anyone interested, here's the document in modern Word format, with all vector artwork and fonts intact:
https://jasomill.at/proposal.docx 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 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 https://jasomill.at/proposal-Word16.82.pdf
[1] https://archive.org/details/ms-word98-special-edition https://archive.org/details/ms-word98-special-edition
- jasomill 3y agoAs an aside, MacClippy 98 knew the score: https://jasomill.at/Clippy.png https://jasomill.at/Clippy.png
- throwaway828 3y agoMacClippy seems like a useful bot. Similar to AI chat windows on websites without the second guessing.
- whoopdedo 3y agoDid 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. [1] http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT
- jasomill 3y agoGood question. I saved the original document as RTF and extracted what I believe is the raw PICT binary data, but quickly decided on the Acrobat route when I realized I didn't know of any software that could easily convert PICT to a more modern vector format (other than by printing the PICT to Acrobat PDF, but that's essentially what I did in Word with extra steps). If you want to give it a go, here's the raw PICT data from the RTF: https://jasomill.at/Picture1.PICT https://jasomill.at/Picture1.PICT (extracted from RTF tag \pict\macpict\picw513\pich459) https://jasomill.at/Picture2.PICT https://jasomill.at/Picture2.PICT (\pict\macpict\picw410\pich327) https://jasomill.at/Picture3.PICT https://jasomill.at/Picture3.PICT (\pict\macpict\picw420\pich291) and here are MacBinary-encoded[1] PICT files containing the same data: https://jasomill.at/Picture1.bin https://jasomill.at/Picture1.bin https://jasomill.at/Picture2.bin https://jasomill.at/Picture2.bin https://jasomill.at/Picture3.bin https://jasomill.at/Picture3.bin [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBinary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBinary Encoding is required because the PICT file format stores image data in the file's resource fork[2]. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork
- Gormo 3y agoJust tried it and confirmed that LibreOffice can indeed read PICT files as vector images and re-export to SVG. This can be scripted using the `--convert-to` option on the LibreOffice command line.
- animal_spirits 3y agoThe sci-fi job of digital archaeologists are becoming real!
- tomjakubowski 3y agoany time you dig through layers of git commit history to answer a question, you are performing archaeology
- jgrahamc 3y agoMarvellous. Thank you!
- ragebol 3y agoI 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)