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Comment by msephton | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice opens it right up. It's support for old document file formats is really excellent. I keep it around for just this purpose. https://imgur.com/a/JENgq6V

But I also love using BasiliskII and InfiniteMac emulators!

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Yeah we read the article--- which matches your screenshot.

This is for all the TL;DR folks.

I think your summary is a bit short. Sure, LibreOffice opens the file but there are multiple problems with the formatting that need correcting. Your screenshot shows at least one of them (there shouldn't be any headers on the first page and the page layout should be different).

The question is: is there a bug report?

The question was "can we open it?"

> LibreOffice opens it right up. It's support for old document formats is really excellent.

Yes, the OP also mentions that LibreOffice opens it.

...but they also point out with LibreOffice that "Although there's something weird about the margins and there are other formatting problems." - which is also apparent in your screenshot? Certainly that level support for such an old proprietary format is pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd class it as "really excellent" with those issues.

Yes, LibreOffice opened it right up with the wrong font sizes, headers and footers messed up, incorrect gutter and margins, and a bunch of other problems. But they were all fixable.

I should have been clearer: what I meant was that its support for very many different old document formats is excellent. Atari ST, Amiga, Macintosh, and so on. The OP and you are quite right that it won't open the documents with exactly the right formatting, but it's good enough in a pinch so you don't have to learn how to use 40 year old computers. It's a good tool to have.

7zip has similar support for a wide range of compressed file formats, exes, data files, cabinets, and so on. Another good tool to save time and keep you on your modern operating system.

> 7zip has similar support for a wide range of compressed file formats, exes, data files, cabinets, and so on.

7zfm.exe (7-Zip File Manager) anyway, which I agree is very useful. I've wanted it in Linux multiple times to avoid creating loopback devices but seem to always find it's Windows only.

I was referring to 7z on the command line.

Ah nice, I didn't realize it worked with the wider types of archives. I'm pretty sure I dug into the source in the past when trying to get it to handle an ISO in Linux and found that it was only supported on Windows. But that might have just been the GUI and not the command line tool.

Thanks!

Give QEMU a try — current versions do a great job emulating a Power Mac, able to run the most recent PowerPC versions of both classic Mac OS (9.2.2) and Mac OS X (10.5).

With what command line?

Figuring out what to ask qemu to do (without libvirt!) is half the battle.

(Thanks though, I have something to play with tonight)

On macOS, I typically run it from an .app bundle containing a one-line shell script that execs the following script with the "-monitor vc" option (to enable access to the QEMU monitor via a menu command in the Cocoa GUI; when actively using the monitor, I run the script directly with the "-monitor stdio" option instead, as opening the monitor in the Cocoa GUI hides the emulated Mac's display):

  #!/bin/bash
  export PATH=
  here="$(/opt/ld/bin/realpath -s "$(/usr/bin/dirname "$0")")"
  workdir="$here"
  name="$(/usr/bin/basename "$workdir")"
  qemu='/opt/qemu/bin/qemu-system-ppc'
  
  cd "$workdir" \
      && exec "$qemu" \
          -display cocoa \
          -L pc-bios -boot c -no-reboot \
          -M mac99,via=pmu -m 768 \
          -rtc base=localtime \
          -g 1920x1080x32 \
          -prom-env 'boot-args=-v' \
          -prom-env 'auto-boot?=true' \
          -prom-env 'vga-ndrv?=true' \
          -nodefaults \
          -device pci-ohci,id=usb0 \
          -device usb-kbd,id=keyboard0 \
          -device usb-mouse,id=mouse0 \
          -device VGA,edid=on,vgamem_mb=32,id=vga0 \
          -nic tap,id=nic0,ifname=tap9,script=no,downscript=no,model=sungem,mac=00:50:56:16:65:09 \
          -drive file="$here/disk/Classic.img",format=raw,media=disk,id=hd0 \
          -drive file="$here/../../scratch/$name/Scratch.img",format=raw,media=disk,cache=unsafe,id=hd1 \
          -drive media=cdrom,id=cd0 \
          "$@"

Paths are (obviously) site-specific, realpath is the GNU version — used here to ensure nice-looking absolute paths in light of my heavily symlinked filesystem — and specific details (options supplied in no particular order, $workdir vs $here, etc.) are artifacts of hours of fiddling and not cleaning up afterwards.

I'm currently running a version of QEMU recently built from Git, though I haven't changed this script in years.

For networking, I'm currently using the notarized tap kext bundled with Tunnelblick[1].

Finally, I'm currently using an Intel Mac, so YMMV with Apple Silicon or Linux, though I have no particular reason to believe any command-line changes would be necessary, other than the obvious -display change to something other than cocoa for Linux.

[1] https://www.tunnelblick.net/downloads.html

Well, StarOffice already existed back then. Now I wonder whether LibreOffice still has some early '90s third party format parsing code inside, or some reverse engineered compatibility and conversion code from much later Word version actually does the job.

LibreOffice was the first thing I tried, and it worked with no problem.

Well, except for all the problems I outlined in the post.

headline says "open" and libreoffice opened it with no problem.

I simply opened the file with my hex editor. Problem solved. (sarcasm)

I actually opened it in emacs in hexl-mode before I ran the file command!

In the past, I have in all seriousness read Microsoft Word documents on Linux using less. I might have had LibreOffice installed, but it can’t run over SSH.

It works okay with most old school (pre-XML) ones, since the document text is in the file in plain ASCII amidst all the binary formatting stuff. For the new XML formats, less by itself doesn’t do anything useful, but unzip them and you can read the XML containing the document text.

Word supported a mode, in order to speed up saving, changes were appended to the file in a diff-like format. How could you know you were reading the right content if it could be overwritten later on?

Sometimes “reading the right content” isn’t that important - e.g. “what is this random doc document about?” “oh, it is a design doc for the XYZ subsystem”. Unless the changes completely rewrote the document into a completely different document, which I expect would be rare

If I was going to use the document in anger, I would open it with something proper, of course

I once negotiated a higher offer for a job because the company sent out an offer letter they'd done this with, where the deleted details for another offer gave me info about another role that made me (correctly) guess there was room to ask for more.

Reminds me of whatever image format or editor that handled cropping the same way. Data was still there, bounds just redefined.

I remember a celebrity leaking some photos or similar back in the early 2000s or similar.

> but it can’t run over SSH.

I know it's being pedantic, but it absolutely can, libreoffice will happily run over a ssh -X tunnelled X display.

Oh yeah, but that would require me to start an X server. Which I could do, but why bother when less does the job?

Also, less starts a lot faster than LibreOffice does

So does Word 2019 for Windows.

Is the formatting correct? Are the images visible? Because others report (see other comments) that Word opens the file but the images are missing. See the Word generated PDF here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359079

Yes, you are right, apologies. I thought it wouldn't open at all, like in the screenshot in that blog post.

Yeah, I stopped reading the article, downloaded the file, the only word processor is in Libre Office. It seemed to work fine so I didn't know what the issue was. Then I read the article and kept scrolling to the end where the author finally uses LibreOffice and it opens mostly okay.

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