Exporting Data From Pagemaker Files

Contributor(s): Steven Weinberger

Open the file.
Click on the "T" in the small toolbox
Click anywhere within the text.
Pull down the Edit menu and point to "Edit Story" (if "Edit Layout" is selected, the screen might show large black areas, have text in huge font or on top of other text, and so forth). If there were any garbage characters (not part of the text, but data about fonts and so forth) at the top and/or bottom of the document, these should no longer display, and the first line of content should display at the top of the file.
Pull down the Edit menu and click on "Select All." This should highlight the entire contents of the file.
Pull down the File menu and click on "Export." You will have to enter the name of the file you want created for the export (use the filename format goldstein-eng-tib-dict-t.rtf, where t is the original file). For the file format, select Rich Text Format (.rtf file extension).
Open the .rtf file and save it as a .txt (plain text) file with the filename format goldstein-eng-tib-dict-t.txt
Create a new Word doc that will receive the content of the file after it is converted. Use the filename format goldstein-eng-tib-dict-t-youtso-converted.txt (note: this must be a plain text (.txt) file.

Download the TB Youtso Font Converter and install it (installation takes several minutes).
Launch the converter
Click on "Set Source File" and select the .txt file you created form the .rtf file you exported (goldstein-eng-tib-dict-t.txt)
Click on "Set Output File" and select the file you created to receive the converted content (goldstein-eng-tib-dict-t-youtso-converted.txt).
Pull down the "Source File Format" menu and select "CDAC / Gist ISM (Plain Text)"
Click on "Convert." The converter will automatically insert the converted text into the Output file.
The entire contents of the file goldstein-eng-tib-dict-t-youtso-converted.txt will now be in TMU, so everything except the Tibetan text from the original file will be garbage Tibetan characters.
In the original files some of the Tibetan strings have a final tsheg and some do not. This needs to be standardized (and a decision about whether to use a final tsheg or a final shad needs to be made by Goldstein and Germano).
Chris Fynn's suggestion for converting just the TB-Youtso:
1. Export the data from PageMaker into a .rtf file.
2. Write a Word macro which searches for text in a particular font: it selects up to the end of the text in that font, copies that selection to another file and repeats this up to the end of the file