I have taken the liberty of (1) setting 2 cm margins all around, because the margins come out funny, and (2) putting the cursor draw stuff in a monospaced font, because that makes sense.

This is how it looks when converted to RFT within DW3 then converted to WP5 format using convert.exe (option 2) then opened in LibreOffice. This file includes formatted text (as much as DW3 can do that), centred text, cursor drawing and strike out (the row of hyphens near the bottom is how text struck out with hyphens is rendered the row of Xs is text struck out with X). (Or, if you have it, a modern version of WordPerfect.) Can Word open WP5 files? Double-click on that in Windows (Linux, whatever) and select LibreOffice (swriter.exe on Windows) to open it. You can also use DW3 to export the file as RFT then use option 2 (option 3 might work too, because DW can export to FFT) in any case, do not define a CRS file (whatever that is).

To convert a DW3 file, use option C, as above. This program can use a DisplayWrite file, but will also do RFT ( not RTF) and FFT (revisable-form-text and final-form-text), both of which DisplayWrite can output. We enter the existing file name and the one to convert to. Put your DisplayWrite file in the same folder as the convert.exe program, run DOSBox and mount that folder as a drive in DOSBox. Then, copy the file into a DOSBox or DOSBox-X installation - DOSBox is easy to install, I leave to to you. The trick is to go via WordPerfect 5.1 format, which can be read in by LibreOffice, because of the amazing stability of the WordPerfect file format.įirst, download this convert.exe utility that used to come with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (I have no idea how long the link will remain live): I have seen the odd request on the web about how to read old DisplayWrite files, so I thought I would document it here. TXT, but they are not what we think of as text files (I used to use DW3 as the extension). The default file format on DisplayWrite is a binary format. DisplayWrite 3, for example, does not even have italics - it really is like a typewriter on a computer.

They were quite good in many ways, but never made it into the GUI era. DisplayWrite was a family of word processors from IBM in the 1980s.

Download wordperfect 5.1