Greetings. My husband has used Mariner Write for yonks, but as anyone who has MW knows, it is no longer supported and as a 32-bit application which is no longer being developed by Mariner it will only run on macOS 10.14 Mojave and older.
Anyone know of any kind of universal file viewer or suchlike that one can run on Catalina and newer that could open these in a tolerable way. TextEdit, sure, but it’s awful. Otherwise, he’ll convert manually (probably to Pages).
Try Libre Office. It’s been able to extract with reasonable formatting from any word processing file in my collection (including old MacWrite and WriteNow documents). I’ve never dealt with Mariner Write., but, for the price, it can’t hurt to try it.
If you can’t get LibraOffice to do the job (although it does an amazing job for many of my outdated apps) you can always try File Juicer. I have rescued many items using that. File Juicer will dig out the texts, graphics and other data and sort them into appropriate files. Now it rescues just the basics, not formatting, so you will have simple text and any graphics all in separate folders, not integrated into any document. Hope that is of help.
I would think installing an older OS on a portable drive that would run MW and using it to export into something useful today or at least importable into Pages or something would be a lot easier than the Parallels idea…that requires Parallels and it’s a bit harder to do than getting a Mojave installer and running it…then selecting the external disk instead of the normal boot drive that’s a newer version of macOS. Then use Startup Disk to change to the external and boot, install MW, and open/export the files.
I’m sure that many of us here would be happy to sort of email talk you through the process…although Adam might prefer it be taken off line so if you’re interested in something like that drop me your email in PM if one can do that on the website…or you can leave a comment on my travel blog at guntherandkara.com with it and I can ask questions and help you figure out if doing this is a viable thing within your comfort level.
The Parallels idea isn’t all that hard either…but it does require spending money for Parallels. VirtualBox is free to use but is also probably harder than just installing Mojave on an external drive. Me…I actually kept my bride’s 2013 or so MacBook Air when she got her new M1 for things like this…and so far it hasn’t been necessary.
Might also see if Libra Office or Neo Office or one of those other Office like packages will import MW files…I’ve no idea as I’ve never used MW and only rarely those other things. Open Office is the only one I’ve got installed since my wife gets documents in it from one of her association people and it doesn’t reference MW…so opening them in MW and exporting as something else should work nicely if you can get Mojave installed (and MW) on another drive.
Thanks much for the offer, @neil1 ! We have installed LibreOffice on his machine and it’s working like a charm so far with MW, so I think that should do it. He’s going to upgrade, but the issue was that he’d have to convert all his old MW into something else before moving to the new machine, but now, with Libre, he won’t need to, since he will be able to open the old files with Libre on the new machine. So grateful to you all for life-saving advice!
VMware Fusion is free for personal use and is easier to set up in some ways compared to VirtualBox so that is another option for those looking to run old OS systems.
No worries…we’re here to help. This is one of the good lists where one can ask a question you don’t know the answer to and actually get helpful answers. Been doing Macs since 1987 or so and just today I posted a question about the new Passkey thing that’s coming with macOS, iOS, and iPadOS in the fall wondering if anybody had more details than I was able to find on googling about it a bit.
If Libre opens them just fine…then depending on how many files there are I might go ahead and just convert them all to Libre format instead of MW…might be AppleScript-able or perhaps Shortcuts or Automator scriptable…but if its thousands or even hundreds then it might be too hard to do that…but make I would make sure that Libre on an updated machine opens them correctly before just moving the files to the new macOS…if they open properly in Libre under Mojave then they will probably open just fine in Libre under Big Sur or Catalina or whatever…but with irreplaceable files I always like to make sure. Just because I’m paranoid does not mean they’re not out to get me.
I had forgotten about that…I think I will grab a copy and set myself up with a Mojave or whatever the last 32 bit system was just in case…plenty of room on a 2TB SSD that I can sacrifice a 50 or 75 GB for just in case things.
Found a preview of the M1 version…will give that a whirl.
I recommend re-saving the documents in a Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx). Almost any word processing program can open those formats, while the native format for Libra Office (.odc) is not so universally openable. Once you reach a stable target (say Pages), re-save in its native format and you’re good to go.