Old dead formats
Through one way or another I found myself talking to a co-worker about Rocky Horror. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a part of my left since around 1991. I’ve not seen in fully in a theater in a few years but I know it by heart.
But that’s not the issue at hand.
I was big into the Rocky scene back in the day. I had one of the most complete audience participation script out there as well. I also maintained the Rocky Horror Theater List for around a decade.
I wanted to give her a copy of my script since she’s never seen the movie.
And so the problem begins.
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One thing to know about me is that I tend to not throw things away. I have files on my systems that have legitimate last write dates back to 1993 that I’ve been copying from old system to new system ever since I saved it.
In 1993 I was rocking Windows 3.1 and Word 6.0.
I have files that I had last saved back then. Before some of my co-workers were even alive.
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No problem, right?
Problem.
I tried opening the .doc file in Pages on my Mac. No go.
I tried to convert the .ps file to a PDF. No luck with the default Mac tools. Nothing with Adobe PDF Distiller. No joy with Ghostscript.
I opened up the .doc with Office365. It opened. Kind of.
I remember spending ages as a twenty-year-old working with the Word styles to get everything just so. (I guess I’ve always been one to try to get the right abstractions instead of hard-coding everything)
All of that is hosed. At least I can read it.
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I finally found something after searching for an hour. The open source LibreOffice. That finally was able to open the file with the correct formatting and bring it back to life.
Complete with the glorious styles I worked so hard on!
This makes me so happy!
So, here. Go and download the newly minted and readable PDF of the audience participation script!