PCbanter - View Single Post - Reading a Win98 Wordpad File in Newer Versions of Windows

**Bill in Co** · July 3rd 15, 07:31 PM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

wrote:
On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 12:21:20 -0400, micky
wrote:

I'm not sure "just" is the right word. They'll have to install their
printer to your computer, which means it will have to be listed in XP's
list of printers, or they'll need the installation program that came
with their printer but which they may have misplaced, or they'll have to
find and download the file from the maker's webste or elsewhere.

I was staying in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem when
I had to print something. I'm trying to remember what it was but I
think it was just a couple pages. Needless to say, I had no printer
with me. I did remember to bring a flashdrive with me (as cheap as $4
or 5 now) so I took the file** to a small Arab computer shop in the
Moslem Quarter (well, right by the Yaffa Gate) which mostly rented
computers to people who worked right there. They had about 15 PCs.)
But he couldn't print it. I could watch what he was doing, but I missed
the error message.

**(I forget what format it had, but it wasn't exotic. Probably from
notepad or wordpad.)

So I went back to my room and printed the text to a file, an option of
almost all text editing programs***. That he had no trouble with.
IIUC, one prints the file from a cmd box using DOS commands,

It's done. I saved the file as both a .DOC and .RTF. I put it in my XP
laptop and the .doc file was all garbage characters, but the .RTF file
was fine. When I got to the print shop, they were closed. I thought they
were open till 5pm, but they close at 4. I ran into a friend who told me
to take it to the library, and they can print it.

I went to the library and she connected me to a computer. The .RTF
loaded fine, but because I put a small picture on the page, it would not
fit on one page. The woman told me she could fix it, and got the header
next to the picture, rather than below it, (which is what I wanted
anyhow). Then it fit the page and printed perfectly. I only had to pay
for the copies, not for any help. I'm very happy with the results.

I asked what software was being used, and it's MS Word 10, running
Windows 7. That's the first time I ever used Windows 7, or MS Word.
MS Word looked very complicted, but worked well for my needs. Windows 7
looks a lot like XP from waht I could see.

Thanks for everyone who told me to use .RTF. I quickly found out that
.DOC is useless, if transferred to another OS.

Well, if you use Wordpad to create a .DOC file. If you use MS Word to
write a .DOC, file it should be able to be transferred to another OS.

BTW, there are some good cheap alternatives to MS Word that are much better
than Wordpad. You might check into them sometime. I'll mention two of
them: Kingsoft Writer (or Kingsoft Office), and Notepro. And both can
handle .DOC files pretty well (have native .doc support).