Converting Writer files to Draw files

When I open AppleWorks Draw documents in LibreOffice, they are opened as LibreOffice Writer files. I tried using “Open With” to open them in Draw, but they are still opened in Writer. What is the best work-around:

  1. Can LibreOffice Writer documents be converted to Draw documents?

  2. Can all the objects anchored to a Writer document be selected, copied and pasted into a Draw document? (“Select All” does not appear to do anything.)

  3. (In the Navigator the entire document appears as OLE Objects and Text Frames.) How can all the OLE Objects be selected together within Writer?

I would be pleased to provide an example file.

The documents are maps, composed of circles, text and lines. If I copy and paste the objects, one by one, into a Draw document, they become editable. In Draw if I click on a line I can press F8 and edit the points. I need to do this to correct errors introduced from translating from AppleWorks and to update the maps.

Thanks from a mathematics teacher from California!

Hello Ben_Etgen, when you open your AppleWorks Draw file in LibreOffice Writer, you can export it to PDF, then open that PDF file in LibreOffice Draw. HTH, best regards -lib

Thank you LibreBel for this excellent suggestion! :slight_smile:

yw @Ben_Etgen, please tell us if it worked, and if you could edit all of the exported objects in Draw.

When you use File Open dialog in LibreOffice, you may see in its File Type drop-down long list that there are four ClarisWorks/AppleWorks (*.cwk) filetypes - one for each section for text, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing documents. So, probably, it’s easier to manually select appropriate file type in this drop-down when opening the AppleWorks file, than to import it using the first filter that LibreOffice finds itself (that happens to be Writer’s filter) and then export and re-import using another format.

Actually i tried to open a sample .cwk file using all (5) available .cwk import filters in Draw ( the 5th is called “ClarisResolve Document” ), and 4 of them yielded a General Input/Output error. Only importing using the filter “ClarisWorks/AppleWorks Text Document (*.cwk)” works, and it is automatically opened in Writer.

Ah, I was afraid of this (don’t have AppleWorks documents at hand, but anticipated something like that - hence “probably” in answer). But that needs to be filed as bug report at Bugzilla with a sample attachment.

i downloaded this sample .cwk file called “air and water title” from the openoffice forum. Can anyone confirm if this is a bug? I thought since the .cwk extension is used for several different file content types, that it caused these Input/Output Errors if the chosen filter type did not correspond to the actual file contents.

I tried and get “General Input/Output error”. But I cannot confirm or reject this being a bug, because I cannot confirm that this file is actually a Draw file.

Currently, yes, the ClarisWorks/AppleWorks draw files are converted as text document(1)(2) ; only the ClarisWorks/AppleWorks paint files are converted in Draw :-~

(1) see note V1 in Section Drawing Applications of libmwaw / Wiki / Home

(2) for various reasons, I try to retrieve linking text boxes and this is not possible in Draw, …