Hi Tarbat,
There are indeed converters that can rescue data from many ancient
word-processing file formats, including Multimate. Most of the
converters are commercial products, though Microsoft apparently did
release a Multimate converter for Word 6.0, as a downloadable update
file. Earlier versions of WordPerfect are also said to have had
support for Mulimate files.
I’d recommend you take a look at DataViz’s product, Conversions Plus,
which can translate between a large number of file formats. (
http://www.dataviz.com/ ) The supported file types page specifically
mention Multimate Advantage 1.0 and Multimate 3.x, 4.0 (
http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/cpw_translist.html )
The product retails at $70 for a Single User CD. I used DataViz’s
MacLinkPlus conversion product about 8 years ago and was pleased with
the results.
There are several other converters I found on the web:
The Filtrix product from Blueberry Software (http://www.blueberry.com/
) also converts from Multimate, according to the supported formats
page (http://www.blueberry.com/formats.htm ) The price seems a little
high, at $189, but there’s a demo from the page that you can try too,
to evaluate the product.
Another possible product might be WordPort from Ascii.com
(http://www.acii.com/wpt.htm ), which claims to read Multimate 3.2 to
4.0, Multimate Advantage and Advantage-II formats. It’s a commercial
product as well ($150), but there’s a trial download that you can test
drive from the bottom of the page to at least verify that it would do
the job. [Note the demo limitation: the test version “introduces
spelling and numeric inaccuracies”.]
I do have another option for you, one that comes with a bonus software
industry history:
A company in Arizona named Mastersoft marketed a popular file
converter product in the early 90’s called Word for Word, which had
support for a wide variety of file formats, including Multimate.
Mastersoft was apparently bought in 1995 by Frame (the makers of
Framemaker). Adobe Systems subsequently acquired Word for Word when
it bought Frame later in 1995, and packaged it as part of a set of
tools called the Adobe File Utilities. This product was discontinued,
however and sold to Inso in 1997. According to the Usenet postings I
found, Inso was a competitor of Mastersoft’s and had no desire to
market Word for Word. Inso later became Stellent, and their file
conversion filters may still be in use today in their online file
conversion tools at http://www.Stellent.com
Inso, however, licensed the Word for Word filters (including support
for Multimate 3.3 and 4.0 file formats) to Sun Microsystems, who
incorporated them into the Windows and Solaris versions of their
office suite, StarOffice. The StarOffice 5 series was downloadable
for free. The newer version, Staroffice 6, is now a commercial
product retailing for $75.95. So for about the same price as the
DataViz converter, you could get an entire office suite with word
processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, etc.! Also, if you
happen to be at a school or educational institution, you may qualify
to get StarOffice for free. (Note that the file filters, referred to
as “W4W”, are only part of the CD version, not the web-downloadable
version.) If this option interests you, you can find out more at
Sun’s website: http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/6.0/
It seems that the filters for these old file types have an interesting
heritage of their own. I hope that this answered your question, and
that you get the files converted successfully.
Regards,
Duncan2-ga
SEARCH STRATEGY:
I first tried the phrase “Multimate Conversion” in Google:
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22multimate+conversion%22&btnG=Google+Search
Then I checked Usenet postings through Google Groups for multimate
conversion:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=multimate+conversion&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en
(I also tried several variations of “convert” and “conversion”)
The Usenet postings include lots of message from people with similar
requests. The message that got researching Inso and Dataviz was this
one:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=OtUaS3Q08GA.329%40nih2naab.prod2.compuserve.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26q%3Dmultimate%2Bconversions |
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