Convert Symantec MORE to OPML on Mac? #5
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I posted a note here -- |
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It looks like OmniOutliner was able to import MORE files through version 3 (https://discourse.omnigroup.com/t/does-omnioutliner-import-more-files/24833/2). You can still download OmniOutline 3.10.6 (https://www.omnigroup.com/download) So you could probably download and use that to convert to a newer file format. |
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Thanks very much for the suggestion. Unfortunately, OmniOutline3 won't run on my machine. My Mac is currently running 4 year-old Mojave (10.14) and soon I'm going to have to update to Catalina to stay compatible with some mission-critical software. I think OO3 stopped working in 2013 with MacOS 10.9, which is the minimum requirement for 004. I'm looking for a way to convert MORE to OPML using a relatively current MacOS. I'd appreciate any suggestions. |
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to WidescreenEnt: Out of curiosity to see if possible, I think I managed to get More 3.1 running under SheepShaver. I say "think" because I know nothing about outliners. I made a tiny outline with More 3.1, saved it,, quit More, then reopened and edited it; etc. (I am running Sheepshaver on a six year old MacBook Air, still on Mavericks.) It is a fair amount of work to get SheepShaver up and running. Do you have a test case (a file and what you want done to the file) I could try on my machine). The result might help you decide what to do next. I am a dabbIer in the world of programming, so I realize this might seem like a zany suggestion. |
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@rogera47 I'm open to zany suggestions. ;-) All I want to do is take a text-only MORE outline and export it to OPML. (I'm not sure if MORE had this capability) I'm unfamiliar with SheepShaver - did you have an old version of MacOS already, or does SheepShaver take care of that? |
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Do not take what I am about to say as reliable, but just as the record of someone hacking around. Using some version of More (3.1) running under Sheepshaver I created a little outline, saved it with the suffix I then exported that file to an OPML file. At that point, I had to give up because I didn't know how to do anything with that OPML file. Could you give me some guidance? That ends the "hacking around" I did. You asked about Sheepshaver. In brief, it is a program which can emulate a Mac running, for example, Mac OS 9 (a Mac operating system that precedes the Mac OS X family of operating systems.) I think setting up SheepShaver takes a fair amount of effort, so please don't embark upon that effort on the basis of my toy explorations. |
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@rogera47 you have succeeded! Getting the MORE outline open in Mavericks-OmniOutliner is the goal. OO can export to OPML. OPML is just an interchange format so I could bring he outline into other programs like Curio or Dynalist and retain the outline structure. Also, OPML is a text-based XML format, better for archiving than MORE's proprietary format. I'll look into SheepShaver -- what version of MacOS were you emulating to make this work? |
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You can test the OPML using Drummer or the validator, if the file is accessible over the web. In Drummer, launch the app, it'll create a Notes file automatically, and choose Import OPML from the File menu. Choose a file from the local disk.
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In an earlier post I wrote: "I then exported that file to an OPML file. At that point, I had to give up because I didn't know how to do anything with that OPML file. Could you give me some guidance?" Scripting kindly responded but I could not carry out the instructions as given. I think it is because I am using a version of Firefox compatible with Mac OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks). As internet sites keep telling me, that is an old browser. Likely for the same reasons, I also cannot get sensible results when I try to drag and drop the file, which twitter says I should be able to do. So I am attaching a screenshot of a related file. The file shown in the screenshot is titled: "TextWrangler_version_of_estate3.1_textsave-2.xls" The file I cannot seem to make available to WidescreenEnt is: estate3.1_textsave-2.xls which is the result of saving as text a little outline I created in More as described in earlier posts. All for now.
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Struggling to convert a bunch of More3.1 files (boy, do I MISS that program). Grateful for the tip about OO3, and indeed, I still have my serial number from that program. But is there any obvious way to figure out how late that program will run? It says it needs 10.4. But what's the last OS it will run under? |
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IIRC, it's 10.8. The way to be sure is to read the system requirement for OO4, because it superceded OO3 and no longer parsed MORE files. So OO3 should run on the OS that precedes OO4. |
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Is that really the logic? I agree with "So OO3 should run on the OS that precedes OO4." but does it follow that OO3 won't work on anything that OO4 did? I remember certain bumps in the MacOS environment (Catalina) where stuff before wouldn't work after. Is there a map of those bumps? |
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[https://web.archive.org/web/20001110100200/https://nogoodreason.com/] Seems like there once was a MORE to TEXT and MORE to XML translator. |
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@rkrato -- that was written by Brad Pettit, a member of the MORE dev team. |
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@lessig IIRC, OG said that OO4 was a big jump to the next OS, and you had to upgrade, because OO3 wouldn't work in that OS. So the choice was between using the next OS or being able to open MORE files. For more specific info, I think you should contact Ken Case. |
thanks! I had found the archive.org version of the side, but sadly, MORE to TEXT isn't there. |
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@lessig -- I was able to download the file and uploaded it here.. http://scripting.com/publicfolder/misc/MOREXML.sit.hqx Now the question is finding a copy of the StuffIt compression utility for the Mac to access the contents of that file. |
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@lessig -- okay sorry about that, but I think we'll do better with the XML converter than the text converter anyway. Here's what I suggest.
I will then try to convert the XML into something you can import, basically convert it to OPML or Markdown. If we get that far, we can have an interesting discussion. |
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I was able to find this, but didn't have any success getting something useful from it. I'm guessing that these tools won't run on current versions of the Mac OS. I'm not sure these are the answer to the original question, I was hoping more for possible knowledge of the file format so that we could create a MORE to OPML translator. |
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@rkrato -- I don't have any MORE data files on my current computer setup. I have lots of backups on disks I can't read. If someone wants to upload a MORE file -- I'm willing to take a look at what's in the file. |
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@scripting can you please post the MOREXML.sit.hqx file somewhere else? I'm unable to connect to the file. I have some older Stuffit apps that might do the job. |
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@WidescreenEnt -- sorry -- I made a mistake typing in the URL. Here's the correct address. |
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Here it is in a zip: I couldn't launch the app because it needs OS9/Classic. |
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we're getting closer! |
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The More 3.1 installer folder contains some sample documents, but I think their creator type flags them as "library" files. Please take a look and see if they can be pressed into service. |
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I found some MORE files on my father's old hard drive, he was an avid MORE user. You can open them in the TextEdit app, but it's a binary file. So no copy/paste is possible. |
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I'm not a programmer - can a binary to ASCII converter render something useful from the MORE files? |
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Does anyone in this thread know anyone at OmniGroup? They figured out the More file structure already. I think the reason they dropped support was that it was made up of code and frameworks that Apple wasn't supporting in the OS moving forward. They didn't want to spend the resources on rewriting it from scratch. Since it's obsolete, maybe they'd share the knowledge. |
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I've had some luck converting files of various formats into other formats using an XML "wrapper" and XSLT. Is there documentation about the contents of a MORE file, or of OO3 OPML output? Most browsers will do XSLT |
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AFAIK, OmniGroup is the only source of the MORE file format. That's why I asked if anyone here had a connection, to make it easier to get the file spec from them. |
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I don't have MORE file format docs, don't know if they ever existed. At the time we had the source code to MORE, and often that was enough docs for the devs. Given that it is a binary format, my guess is that it is the "Boundary Tag Method" as described by Knuth in his classic computer science primer. That was the default format we used back in the 80s and 90s. Not that that would be much help unless you were a C programmer. ;-) Brad Pettit is around, I see him on Facebook sometimes, he wrote the utility that we can't run now. I don't want to ask him to join the thread here, because that's like asking for free work. If he finds his way here, he may have the source for his converter. Or he might not. Even the exporter is very old software now. 😄 |
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BTW, this is why we're doing it the way we're doing it now, outliners use a text-based format. Mine uses OPML. But there's a new crop of outliners that uses a modified version of Markdown. It is what it is. If you look through the recent archive on my blog (around the end of last year) you'll see my pleadings to use OPML, but they must think I'm a weird old guy, they can't imagine that we've done all this before. ;-) If you've ever watched Battlestar Galactica it's the same basic plot. |
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I now have Omni Outliner (v4.14) running under Mac OSX 10.9 (Mavericks). It comes with a folder titled MOREXML Folder. That folder contains two items: More to XML (ApplesScript icon) The second item begins with: MORE™ to XML and is followed by explanatory material written by Brad Petit. I obtained OmniOutliner (v4.1.4) via the support provided by the Omni Group. The two people that guided me to a 12 day trial period were just terrific. (I had a license to an Omni Outliner that ran under a version of Mac OS X that preceded Mavericks.) Could I do anything to help? If the answer is obvious to all of you, you may wonder why I don't see it. Please remember I know next to nothing about outliners, xml, opml. Thank you, Roger |
Is there a way to convert the binary into something human-readable using AppleScript or Python? (Easier to find an AS or Python programmer.) Once it's ASCII wouldn't it be possible to script a GREP to convert MORE's internal data format into OPML? |
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FWIW, I sent Ken Case of OmniGroup an email and requested any info on the MORE file format he'd care to share. |
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@rogera47 -- thanks for the note -- it sounds like you have a copy of the MORE to XML converter, and a machine it can run on. Have you tried running it? If so do you have a MORE file to test with? If not I'm sure we can get you one. If you can run the app against a MORE file and then send me the XML it generates, I can see what it will take to convert that to a file format current outliners can open. Thanks again for going to the effort, also glad to hear the Omni people were so helpful. ;-) |
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That gofile site mentioned by WideScreen seemed to work: [Widescreen commented [4 days ago](https://github.com//issues/5#issu Please remember I am using a version of Firefox that runs under Mac OS X 10.9. Many sites in 2022 do not work under that browser. Could the test MORE file be sent as an attachment to email? (I know next to nothing about what is permitted as an attachment.) Scripting has my email address so that might be a route. RP |
Hi! The best reference I know for the MORE file format are Brad Pettit's Translators referenced on John G. Faughnan's page about Symantic MORE 3.1:
Unfortunately, Brad Pettit's website disappeared in the last decade and appears to have been repurposed for totally different content now, but fortunately for us the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine still has the old site content archived and still includes an archived copy of his That said, being prompted to look into this also prompted me to track down our own OmniOutliner code for reading MORE documents, and I spent a bit of time this morning updating it for 64-bit architectures, modern compilers, and hooking it back up to our current OmniOutliner architecture—with the upshot being that today's test builds of OmniOutliner 5.10 can once again import MORE documents. (Unfortunately, current versions of macOS are no longer able to read the old PICT graphics format from macOS 9, so our old code to translate imported MORE graphics to PDF or TIFF no longer works on the current macOS. Instead, I've updated the import logic to just archive the raw data as a If anyone wants a script to search an entire directory hierarchy and convert all MORE documents to OmniOutliner documents (or OPML or whatever), here's a pointer to a script I shared on our forums some years back: https://discourse.omnigroup.com/t/help-with-script-to-convert-more-files/23075/5. Hope this helps! |
If memory serves, OmniOutliner 3 was still usable on 10.12 Sierra. It had a pretty good run (its first public release was in 2004, and its latest update was in 2012), but all the years of operating system updates finally left it behind. (I used to keep copies of older operating systems around in VMware Fusion to use as needed, but those VMs no longer run on my daily-use M1-powered Macs. I suppose I ought to convert some of them over to run in UTM so I can keep them handy for definitive answers to questions like this!) That said, unless you need some old PICT graphics from your MORE outlines you can just use the restored MORE import feature in the OmniOutliner 5.10 test builds (linked in my post above). |
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@kc-omni -- thanks for reviving the project! I'd like to get some OPML conversions of MORE files to test in Drummer. That's got the best OPML most current OPML code baked in. If you want code to test against -- there's a JavaScript package that reads OPML files into a JSON structure. Another good way to test this. It would be nice at this point to solve this problem in a way that makes sure the archive.org version works so when and if people raise this flag 20 years from now this won't have to be redon. Again, thanks for picking up the ball here. 😄 |
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@kc-omni Does that mean that OmniGroup might have documentation of the file format somewhere that you'd be willing to share? |
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I'm afraid we didn't preserve any documentation or notes from our original reverse-engineering effort, just the implementation in our importer's source code. When we found Brad Pettit's converter in 2005, we made note of it as "Brad Pettit's MORE 2 XML converter, which is as close as it seems we'll get to a reference implementation or file format reference for MOR3 files." |
This is wonderfully helpful. Thank you! |
Hi, I've been going back over my old works-in-progress, and I found quite a few Symantec MORE outlines that, of course, I can't open with my current Mac. I'd like to convert them to OPML for use with current software and for archival purposes.
I can't seem to find a way to do this. The closest I came was OmniOutliner, which used to parse MORE files, but removed the feature some time ago.
Is there software available that will convert MORE files into OPML?
Absent that, is there a way to get the details of the MORE file format so I could provide that to someone who would build such a converter?
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks for considering my request.
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