printer drivers

[piusbird]

Hello:
I read in one of the old wordperfect books I've been exploring that under Dos it was possible to create a custom printer drivers... Two questions..

1. Is that feature present in the unix version
2. is i documented anywhere, I've have a project to hook into pandoc that might be better done as a printer driver.

Thanks Gentlepeople
/M

[emendelson]

The unix version uses the same printer drivers used by WPDOS 5.1. You can create a custom printer driver by using the DOS-based ptr.exe for WPDOS 5.1. You can find a copy of it on Corel's FTP site, ftp.corel.com. It's at /pub/WordPerfect/wpdos/5x/ptr51.exe.

To create a custom printer driver, start with an existing one and modify it. I don't remember any documentation other than the help file, which you access by pressing F3 twice.

You can find some WP manuals here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/manuals.html

[taviso]

Sort of, there was a version of it released for Xenix but not Linux. It should be possible to port that to Linux, but I haven't done that - it's on my todo list, but it's a big job!

I'm not sure this will be helpful if you just want to get something to pipe to pandoc though! There are a bunch of converters that might be useful (check out the list in Ctrl-F5,3 - some are pretty useless, but maybe the RTF or DOC ones might help). There is also a wpd2html that comes with libwpd.

[taviso]

Oh yes, you can use the DOS (or Xenix) version if you want to experiment as @emendelson says - the output should work on Linux!

[emendelson]

As @taviso says, this may not be a useful project for feeding output to pandoc, which requires structured XML-style input. As far as I can tell, WPDOS can't produce that (I once tried making an HTML-output printer driver, and concluded - maybe wrongly - that it was impossible.)

As @taviso says, it may be possible that RTF output from Ctrl-F3 will work with pandoc. I'm fairly certain that libwpd's wpd2html would work, though wpd2odt might be even better, as it does a better job with footnotes, headers, etc., and pandoc can accept odt as input. I use wpd2odt and pandoc under macOS as one method of converting wp to rtf or docx. (Building libwpd is a bit of a nightmare under macOS, but maybe it's easier under Linux...)

EDIT: And it's fascinating to learn that ptr might someday be ported from Xenix to Linux...

[taviso]

You just apt install wpd2odt on Linux, couldn't be easier - maybe I'll get you to switch to Linux one day 😀

[emendelson]

Ah - yes, you're right! I was trying to build a standalone macOS executable of wpd2odt, and finally got it done. The nightmare part was making it static-linked, which isn't necessary on Linux, but is essential for something on a Mac that other people can use.