WordPerfect converter

WordPerfect was the dominant word processor of the late 1980s and early 1990s, first on DOS and then on Windows, and it is still sold by Corel. Law firms, courts, government agencies and universities used it for decades, so records rooms and network drives hold large folders of .wpd and .wp files: briefs, pleadings, contracts, site reports, theses and correspondence. Everyday software no longer reads them directly, which is usually the moment someone needs a 1997 letter or a 2004 form.

All WordPerfect documents start with the same four bytes, FF 57 50 43, followed by a version number. Files from WordPerfect 5.0 and 5.1 use one internal layout, and everything from 6.0 through X9 shares a second, which is why files saved a decade or more apart open the same way. WordPerfect for Mac 2 and 3 files use a third layout and also converted in our tests. Files from WordPerfect 4.2 and earlier have no header at all; we refuse them, because a renamed text file looks identical and comes out with words missing.

Our office engine rebuilds the document from WordPerfect's formatting codes: paragraphs, fonts, tables, footnotes, headers, footers, page numbers and pictures come through, and text stays selectable in a PDF and editable in a DOCX. A few code types have no counterpart and are skipped. The ones that matter most in practice are Equation Editor boxes, which leave gaps in technical reports, and pleading-paper line numbers, which are drawn as a page border. Redline and strikeout survive as red and struck-through text rather than as tracked changes.

Password-protected documents cannot be read without the password, so we check the header and refuse them before converting. For a whole archive, convert to PDF for the record copy and to DOCX for the files people still edit, and open a sample of each batch to make sure the results look like the printouts people remember.