Abbott CanOpener 5.0
Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad
Developer: Abbott Systems 1-800-552-9157 http://www.abbottsys.com/co.html $65.00 USD, Upgrades $30 USD. System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.1 or later. A PowerMac or any Mac with 68020 processor or later. System 7.0 or later for version 4.0. CanOpener 5.0 is Mac OSX native. A windows version is also available. Released: August 8, 2002 Audience: All user levels. Strengths: A great but relatively slow means of extracting text from documents, whether or not you own the parent application. The results can then be searched, cleaned up or otherwise manipulated before pasting into another document. Weaknesses: I really no longer have any obvious odd file extraction use for its otherwise excellent features but will start seeing how I can make future use of its filter capabilities. The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.8. Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. |
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Publisher’s Summary
Abbott’s famous universal file opener lets you read any file -- and extract the text you need! It's perfect for browsing all types of files, including foreign files and files your Mac can't open, and it's valuable for recovering text from damaged files - a lifesaver! CanOpener is now celebrating 16 years on the Mac, so benefit from our experience to Snoop inside orphan or antique files.
In addition, CanOpener lets you view VIRUS infected files without launching the virus. So you can safely check suspect files and recover text from them --a powerful way to avoid virus infections!
Introduction
Years ago in 1989 or 1990, I was a devoted user of a product by Abbot Systems called CanOpener. Those were the days of early classic systems with in the early classic systems — OS’s with numbers that started with 6, 7, 8, and 9. In those days software still came on 3.5” floppy disks. The world of computing on my Macintosh was young and at times stuff I downloaded from Bulletin Boards or subscribed on floppies to a shareware service were filled, at times, with strange document. Documents whose mother software I neither owned nor at time could identify. Along came CanOpener [CO] and allowed me to crack these Macintosh files and see what the documents contained.
CanOpener, of which I was an early adopter, was not a “GraphicConverter http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/263 — it only worked on imbedded text, not graphics. Nor was it a genre driven program — Data Viz’s MacLinksPlus, a product for converting files between Mac and PC formats and between different applications formats. MacLinksPlus focuses on translating, with format intact, word processing file, spreadsheet, database file or graphic files. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/6061
The Abbott product was simply a text extracting can opener — a tool to crack a document to allow me to see its contents. So when I stumbled upon version 5 in my browsing I though I’d look it over for auld lang sein.
Working With
I installed the
software in the usual manner and then began to ponder on how I could test it.
In a eureka moment, I went back to my earliest CD based backup — a set of
technical files from a long defunct nuclear was repository that were in Word Perfect
(PC) format. In those days Word Perfect [WP] was the rage. Alas, unlike using
MacLinksPlus, I could get NO useable data from these early work perfect files.
More about WP PC text extraction later in this review.
When I translated the files from Word Perfect 6 for the PC to Word Perfect 3.5e for the Macintosh, I could read the files with CanOpener. But that obviously is a wasted effort; MacLinksPlus could give me a translation directly into MSW 2004 and also keep all the graphs. [Note: I no longer keep WP on my hard drive since I have the more generally useful MacLinksPlus Installed. In addition, MS Word will open such files if one has the appropriate translation filters installed.]
Working with Macintosh Native Files — The fastest way to open a file is to drag and drop it to CanOpener. If CanOpener is not running, drag and drop to the CanOpener program icon (in the dock) and CanOpener will launch and open the file. If CanOpener is already running, drag and drop to the CanOpener window.
The program worked, more or less as I remembered. When you open a file with CanOpener it scans the contents for text and lists items in the contents area (the top right panel of the CanOpener window.) To display any item, double click it. You can select multiple items by holding down the Shift key and clicking the items. The selected items are displayed in turn with a brief pause between each.
Word Perfect PC File Limitation — I have no idea why my working with WP 6 PC files did not work, but they didn’t.
By the way by
replacing, in MSW, the following symbols with a space, I got readable text. So
all was not lost for using CO on my archive Word Perfect files.
'/ August 3, 2001 (11:36AM)‘ ( h ( p ABSTRACT WM 02, Joe Jablonski, West Valley Nuclear Services ‘_ Company, and Ahmad Al Daouk, U.S. Department of Energy‘_ Achieving Readiness for the Largest Commercial Cross Country Shipment of Spent Nuclear Fuel in the U.S. The West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) is an environmental cleanup project at the site of the only |
This is one more reason I never was comfortable with Word Perfect, all of course in 20-20 hindsight.
Ken Abbott, the product’s developer, wrote me “This is probably a product limitation. CanOpener looks inside files for regular ASCII text. If the text is encoded, compressed, encrypted or in some proprietary format then CanOpener will see it as gibberish. Many people use CanOpener for getting into damaged files, or very old files that they no longer own the application for. It's more of a "data recovery' tool.” From the prospective of a potential user, I cannot fault the program for doing what is was designed to do — I have other means, as noted previously, for resurrecting old WP files and also figured out a painless way to decode the garble.. [Thanks Ken for your overnight response, such service is rare these days!]
I then checked the program by using a very old MSW file I found on an un-erased floppy. Wonderful, I could grab the text with no problem at all. So I then checked the program with a “broken” MS Word file, and was able to access the text, copying the found text to my clipboard and pasting it into a new MSW document. That did work.
One surprising feature, when I tried all of this with a functioning MSW document, I was able to recover almost all the text. That result was not surprising. However, a few of the characters such as a dash did not translate in CO. What did surprise me was that I could also export [Item > Save As] the text as a graphics file. Exporting to a more accurate graphics file export feature was undocumented.
Review Limitations — A lack of time stopped me from more fully exploring the outputs from the various filters and sentence element search modes provided by the developer. They are however listed in the next section.
Package Features
There is more to
this program then I had time to test — but I will continue exploring some
of the features listed below. Such features (see the tables for filter
specifics) are accessible both via the software’s preferences and through
dialog files during text extraction process. Should you have any question, the
clearly written users guide is of great
help. So is access to, for registered users, to the CanOpener user services
link. I especially recommend reading the section on Setting Preferences, if you want to take full advantage of this
multitalented program.
CanOpener has special text filters that let you...
Extract Names, Phone Numbers, URLs, Email, Web and IP Addresses.
Strip HTML Coding. Remove extra Carriage Returns and blank spaces from email and Web text.
Extract important sentences such as questions or anything containing $'s and numbers.
Rapidly find clean text in files that contain huge amounts of 'garbage.'
Discrete Filters: |
Clean EMail - cleans email files |
HTML HREFs - extracts these from an HTML file |
Strip HTML Tags - removes all such coding from an HTML file |
Strip Space - removes all excess space characters |
EMail Addr. - extracts email addresses |
URLs - extracts all URLs |
WWWs - extracts Web addresses only |
Select Sentence Extraction Functions: |
Sentences - extracts sentences |
Sentences w/... - extracts sentences which contain the specified words |
Sentences w/$ - extracts sentences which contain dollars |
Sentences w/0-9 - extracts sentences which contain numbers |
Sentences w/Tel# - extracts sentences which contain telephone numbers |
Sentences w/Name - extracts sentences which contain names |
Sentences w/? - extracts sentences which are questions |
Sentences w/IP Addr. - extracts sentences which contain IP addresses |
Discomforts:
Slow – Slow – Slow — Be patient, the program is somewhat slower than other non-graphic operations most users experience. Don’t command-period when you lose patience; just go fill up your coffee cup. The wait is worth the time.
Conclusions:
Although I haven't had a file I couldn't open in years... and with Norton AntiVirus [NAV] running I never have access to virus-loaded files. I may just keep this little gem on my hard drive. I have tools that do an excellent job at Strip HTML Coding. Remove extra Carriage Returns and blank spaces from email and Web text. Including plug-ins for my email client.
I’m not sure whether, If I were not using I review copy, I spend the $65 asking price, but driven by fond memories to the many times the product allowed me to grab useful information. I would likely do so. As a former registered user the program would certainly be worth the $30 upgrade fee. It’s a little like buying an extra wrench or screw driver or three, a potentially good low-cost investment in the future. I suppose there may be some of you for whom the price is more than they’d like to spend, I’d ask you to reconsider. However, I am also a compulsive hard drive back up freak and have started to do belt and suspender critical financial and photo files file backups on archival CDs.
PS
A reviewer named plateaugal post this review ion the Version Tracker Site. I found it interesting enough to add a slightly edited version as an addendum to this review. [I did not check the process out however, having little interest in spotlight.]
“I am a big enthusiast of CanOpener. It can be combined with Spotlight to make an excellent search engine for everyday use. Spotlight is fast, but limited. CanOpener is slow, but powerful. Suppose you wish to do an exact phrase search. First choose one word in the phrase and have Spotlight to create a Smart Folder for you with all files having that word in them. Then ask CanOpener to search the saved folder for that exact phrase. This cuts down search time dramatically. Once you have the list of files in CanOpener, there are other advantages over just using Spotlight. You can click on an item in the list to see the surrounding text, indeed the entire file, without opening its application. In Spotlight, you have to (have and use) use the application to see the text, and the date modified changes. Besides that, Spotlight (a saved search result) is hard to find on the desktop if you want to return to the found list. With CanOpener, I can quickly check a long list of files, and focus on the few I am interested in. I can also copy and paste material directly into my application. I don't know why this is not on everyone's Dock?”
