I had a last minute request from Emma to stand in for her and celebrate the Eucharist at St John's this morning, which I was happy to do, as I'd intended going anyway. Afterwards I had a wound dressing appointment, and arrived home to find Clare was already back from school and had cooked lunch. She had another school meeting later in the afternoon, so I went out and walked for another hour until she returned for supper.
Her work on the baby book revision is gathering pace, now that she's working with the translator of the original English version from the German. Certain sections of the original text don't need to be revised as the case studies are still relevant. Clare needed to recover text files of these to include in the body of the revision, but our book archive only contained .pdf files and original Publisher 2000 .pub files created in 2012. What could be done to recover editable texts with minimum expenditure of effort? She worried.
Fortunately, I have retained the 2009 Acer Aspire Windows Vista desktop mini-tower machine, with Office 2000 and the version of Publisher on it which I used to create the original publishable texts. But would it still work? Well, it did, even though its CMOS battery is dead, and an assortment of its software is well out of date and flashes up security warnings. Even so, the original .pub file loaded with no complaint and generated a .RTF document which could then be run in Libre Office and used to produce a docx file for modern convenience. Sure there will be minor formatting issues, but much of the required pieces of text can be transferred by cut and paste. I was well pleased with this, as it took so little time. So glad I didn't consign this device to the scrapheap. I could do with a decent old Windows 7 laptop to install legacy software on, to retain such easy access to an assortment of other legacy files accumulated since the start of the new millennium and before. There'll be one out there somewhere for a song, no doubt.
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