I was sure there was another thread on this but I can't find it now. Apologies if this is a duplicate.
I've migrated from Appleworks to Pages and Numbers for my spreadsheet and word processing needs, and converted all my old Appleworks documents that could be converted. There is still a huge glaring gap in Apple's lineup however. (Well two huge glaring gaps but I never used Appleworks' database functions.)
Can anyone suggest a modern replacement for Appleworks Drawings, preferably one that can actually open Drawing files? Last year I found & bought EasyDraw as they said they could open Appleworks Drawing files, but in the end that has proved to be a failure. They can 'open' the files but in doing so a lot of stuff gets corrupted, eg. objects get moved around so everything is out of position and it ends up completely useless. EasyDraw's interface seems complicated and unfriendly to me, and without it being able to correctly open my old files, I've had zero incentive to work with it.
Obviously I'm still on Snow Leopard and this is one of the big reasons for that - I have years and years of files in Appleworks Drawing format, and have yet to find a decent replacement. I don't need fancy 3d rendering stuff, just something simple for making simple 2d drawings.
Thank you!
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She who laughs last -- probably made a back-up.
Do you just need to be able to read the files or do you need to be able to edit them?
If the former they can be saved as pdf files. This is part of the print dialogue. When you click on print there should be a button to allow you to create a pdf. Will also embed whatever fonts you happened to use, so even if your newer system lacks a particular font the file will still display properly.
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The "problem" is that we're not bees trapped in amber, and he can't stay on SL forever.
He should be congratulated for wanting to convert his files BEFORE he finds himself in a jam. I can think of a lot of examples where people failed to do this (I still get 1-2 queries PER MONTH from people who have "vital" records on floppy discs that no longer read!).
Hmmm... not sure about the "The "problem" is that we're not bees trapped in amber" part, but I'm sure not "trapped" with a SL and a Lion boot partition.
But getting old files updated and possibly useable is sure a good idea, and before it's too late, and thanks for the reminder that I have to boot up my G3 DT Mac this week to hopefully recover some data from a local user's recently departed late husband's floppy disks she wants, and some are the old single sided 400k and 700k floppy disks that a USB floppy drive can't even read!!
Thanks for the feedback & suggestions. I've searched the Mac App store and there were zero results for 'appleworks' and 'drawing' - for that matter, zero results for 'appleworks' by itself. I'll have a a look at Intaglio, and I have given EasyDraw another look. The problem with EasyDraw is that it loses all text formatting - any text that was formatted loses everything (indents, alignment, bold, italic, size, colour, etc).
I do have most of the files saved as PDFs as well as Appleworks, so I can view them but the sort of situation we have is a client will want some minor change done to a project that we haven't touched in 5 or 6 years. So if I can't edit or migrate the Appleworks file, it means I have to recreate the entire thing from scratch in some other software. And the clients usually don't want to pay for a full rework when they only want a minor change...
I wonder if the lack of compatible replacements might be in part due to developers assuming Apple would eventually create their own iWork-based replacement. I mean Pages and Numbers (and Keynote) can open some Appleworks formats, it wasn't too big a stretch to figure they'd eventually add a Drawings and maybe even a Databases component as well.
As for being trapped in Snow Leopard, I'm contemplating a new iMac purchase this summer and I suspect a brand new Mac won't let me install 10.6 on it - it'll either be on 10.7 or maybe even 10.8. That's why I'm trying to find the migration path now.
If all else fails I can always leave a Mac running Snow Leopard indefinately in order to support those documents, but obviously that's not ideal.
Anyhow, thanks again for the input!
Cheers!
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She who laughs last -- probably made a back-up.
I do have most of the files saved as PDFs as well as Appleworks, so I can view them but the sort of situation we have is a client will want some minor change done to a project that we haven't touched in 5 or 6 years. So if I can't edit or migrate the Appleworks file, it means I have to recreate the entire thing from scratch in some other software. And the clients usually don't want to pay for a full rework when they only want a minor change...
It's not a good idea to attempt to run a business using consumer-grade software. If the files had been created by a pro application like Adobe Illustrator, the current version of the program would still open them with no problems.
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AppleWorks Drawings
Linear Mode
