View WordPerfect for Windows files in Terminal

Aug 28, '06 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: deef

I have hundreds of WordPerfect for Windows files with contents that I don't need to edit, but often view. They can be opened with NeoOffice or AbiWord, but both of these are fairly slow when I just want to quickly view a file's contents. So I created a contextual menu item which (in the blink of an eye) opens a Terminal window containing the text of the file. Here's what you need to make it work:

  1. OnMyCommand
  2. wpd2text. Note that they used to have Mac binaries here, but it looks like you will need to compile it yourself now (you'll need the Developer Tools to do that).
  3. Add this to your .bashrc file: function settitle() { echo -ne "\e]2;$@\a\e]1;$@\a"; } (taken from this hint).
Once that's all done, add this command to your OnMyCommand command list. If you want, you can pipe the output to less -- I had done this, but I didn't like the way smart quotes, etc. showed up as highlighted hex codes.

Control-click on a WordPerfect file, go to the OnMyCommand contextual menu, select Preview text of WordPerfect file -- bingo, a quick-and-dirty Terminal window appears with the filename in the title and the text displayed.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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