Convert Psion Series 3, 3a and 3c unencrypted Word Documents to Plain Text.
This utility owes a massive debt to the work of Clive Feather, whose Psionics Files contains (among many other useful things) the results of his work reverse engineering the Series 3 applications’ document formats.
Psion Word allows you to enter styled text. Back in the Series 3’s heyday — the mid to late 1990s — Psion provided Windows software that converted these files to Microsoft Word. A separate DOS utility, wrd2txt could convert transferred files to plain text. This latter was the inspiration for word2text, which I wrote to perform exactly the same task, but on a modern macOS machine.
I write either plain text or, when I require formatting, in Markdown format. Psion Word, created long before Markdown’s conception, doesn’t support it, but both types of text file can be created in Word and transferred to a Mac. Word embeds the plain text in a document that also includes a host of file, formatting and printing related data. word2text strips all that away.
The Psion Series 3a uses the IBM Code Page 850 character set. This was used in the DOS days and was superseded first by Windows Code Page 1252 and ultimately UTF-8. 850 and 1252 are not exactly the same, and though Swift can convert from 1252 to UTF-8, it doesn't speak 850. And compiled on Linux, the conversion code has issues with 1252 too, I have found.
word2text converts the UK pound sign £ from 850 value 156 to 1252’s 163. At some point, I may extend this to the full set of matchable characters. If you have a character that is not being correctly converted (word2text should report characters that have issues), please let me know.
Use word2text to convert into plain text any Psion Word documents that you have transferred to your Mac. Provide a .WRD file name as an argument and word2text will output a plain text version to stdout. This way you can pipe the result into other command line utilities or redirect output to a file. For example:
word2text $HOME/Psion/MAGOPUS.WRD > ~/Desktop/MyMagnumOpus.txtIf you include the --file flag, word2text will write the processed text to (using the example above) MAGOPUS.txt and not emit it to stdout.
You can also pass a directory name (or a mix of file names and directories), in which case each .WRD file in the directory will be converted to a text file in that directory. Files generated this way (or with the --file flag) are named after the source file.
word2text $HOME/Psionword2text $HOME/Psion $HOME/Desktop/MY_DOC.WRDFor convenience, files are written using the UTF-8 encoding.
word2text accepts the following modifiers:
-m/--markdown— Output the body text in Markdown formatting. Default:false.-o/--outer— Include ‘outer’ text, ie. header and footer text, in addition to the body text. Default:false.-s/--stop— Stop processing multiple files on the first error. Default:false.-f/--file— Output a single input file to a new file. Default:false.-v/--verbose— Show file and content discovery information during file processing.
For example:
word2text $HOME/Psion/BIDDRAFT.WRD
Bid headline
Bid text to go here...word2text $HOME/Psion/BIDDRAFT.WRD -o
%F-%D:%T
********
Bid headline
Bid text to go here...
*******
Page %Pword2text $HOME/Psion/BIDDRAFT.WRD -m
# Bid headline
Bid text **to go here**...word2text $HOME/Psion/BIDDRAFT.WRD -mo
%F-%D:%T
********
Bid headline
Bid text **to go here**...
********
Page %Pword2text can use Word files’ styling information to mark up the processed text with Markdown formatting tags. This is necessarily limited: Word has only two standard headline sizes, and the only emphasis options relevant to Markdown are bold and/or italic text. Where these apply, word2text will mark up the text accordingly. Text styled as a Word Bulleted List entry will be tagged as a Markdown unordered list.
For custom styles, word2text will apply bold and/or italic emphasis where it can. For custom headlines, word2text will apply a Markdown headline size based on the style’s font size.
In due course, I hope to support table formatting from Word tables and ultimately to more intelligently parse custom Word styles.
Building word2text from source requires my Clicore Swift Package.
- Clone this repo.
- Open the
.xcodeprojfile. - Set your team under Signing & Capabilities for the word2text target.
- Select Archive from the Product menu.
- Export the resulting archive using Distribute Content > Custom > Build Products and save to desktop.
sudo cp path/to/exported/binary /usr/local/bin/word2text.
- Install Swift
- Clone this repo.
cd /path/to/reposwift build
Binary located in .build/aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/debug/. Copy it to a location in your $PATH.
Copyright © 2025 Tony Smith (@smittytone)