WPFilter.EXE
Version 3
A rescue program for corrupted WordPerfect text files

Copyright 1989
Life Sciences Editorial Services

Serving government and the private sector with
professional science/technical writing and editing
since 1975

1236 River Bay Road
Annapolis, Maryland 21401
(301) 261-1370


AUTHOR: Pete Petrakis


PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

This little program recently averted disaster for me when I
"inherited" a writing job from another writer who lives far away.
Although the client supplied me with WordPerfect files of the
other writer's work, every one of those files was corrupted,
evidently because they had somehow gotten "cross-linked" with
executable .COM or .EXE files (probably by someone in the client's
office). As a result, both WordPerfect and my computer became
paralyzed whenever I tried to load the files.

To save as much of these files as possible and get them into a
workable form so I could meet an extremely tight deadline, I wrote
WPFilter. The program strips out all characters except the normal
alphanumeric character set and the line feed and tab characters.
This eliminates the codes that cause WordPerfect to lock up, as well
as all WP formatting codes.

All WPFilter does is convert a corrupted WP text to a "plain
vanilla" ASCII text (what WordPerfect calls a "DOS text") that can
then be loaded in WordPerfect, edited to remove any remaining
ASCII "garbage" characters, and reformatted and saved as a WP file.
Unlike WordPerfect, the program converts the soft carriage return
(ASCII character 13) to a space to avoid run-together words when
the final text is loaded in WordPerfect with margin settings that
differ from the original.

The program probably will work well with text created by other
word processors, although I haven't tested it to see.


Page 1WHAT'S NEW ABOUT THIS VERSION

Version 3 of WPFilter runs many times faster than the original version,
processing about 1800 characters per second on an 8 MHz system with the
source and destination files on a hard disk.


OPERATION

To run the program, type the following on the command line:

WPFILTER SourceFile DestinationFile

where SourceFile is the corrupted file and DestinationFile is the
name of the file that will receive the filtered text. SourceFile and
DestinationFile can include drive and directory designations in the
normal DOS fashion. Be sure a space separates each command line entry.

All ASCII text going to the destination file is displayed as the
program does its work, including any gibberish left over from the
file corruption. This gives a preview of the editing task you face
when you load the filtered text in WordPerfect.

Caution: If you need to interrupt the conversion process for
any reason, use the ESC key, not Control-Break or Control-C.
If you don't use ESC, the source and destination files may
remain open with unpredictable consequences.


DISTRIBUTION

WPFilter may be freely copied and distributed provided no money
is charged for it and it is not modified.


Pete Petrakis
Annapolis, Maryland
















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