I've been tasked with the job of recovering the text of a book stored on a 3.5'' floppy disk. From what I can tell, the book was stored on the disk using a Mac sometime in the 1990s.
I tried simply reading the disk on my older Windows machine, but I received the error: "The disk is not formatted". I tried using several file recovery programs, but they mostly indicated that the disk was probably corrupt.
However, I was able to create an .IMA disk image file in Windows. I transferred this file to my newer PC and opened it was a text editor. It seems that the text of the book is intact, but it is mixed in with many formatting characters that I think are an artifact of some old Mac word processor. For example I think Ü ┐Ü represents a line break.
Is there any (PC) software I can use to parse out all of theses formatting symbols? Or better yet, is there software that could perhaps understand the original format that the book was written in? Unfortunately I do not have a single file, instead it's trapped in a disk image. (And I am not able to extract the disk image because the disk is "corrupt.") I could manually go through and edit the text, but this would be extremely time consuming, considering that the book is ~1 MB.
Thanks!
Best Answer
Best guess with no additional information would be that it is a ClarisWorks file.
LibreOffice should be able to open it - the translation is apparently not perfect, but might be good enough to work with.
Idea garnered from How to open your ClarisWorks files for a stroll down memory lane
There's also the possibility of extracting the files directly from the floppy to Windows using MacDrive or even MacDisk (though that looks pretty old) rather than trying to pick bits out of a WinImage file.