Post a Comment On: Biting the Apple

I have some really old files with Japanese in them in AppleWorks format. If you try to just copy and past the text, it comes out as gibberish. However, there's a method to the madness of the gibberish, so you can convert it back to the original language. It's a bit of a hassle, but doable. (I'll bet this happens automatically when you use Apple's newer Pages to open AppleWorks files, but as I don't have pages I'm stuck with this method.)
Open the AppleWorks file and copy the text you want.Make a new TextEdit file.Select Format > Make Plain Text.Paste the Japanese text into the file.Save it as whatever name you like in the "Western (Mac OS Roman)" encoding.Open that text file in Safari.Select View > Text Encoding > Japanese (Shift JIS).Copy the text in the Safari window, and paste it wherever you like.
You can do similar thing with other encodings; just change Japanese (Shift JIS) with the appropriate encoding for your language.