Comments on: FullWrite for OS X?

By: Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:15:58 +0000

I am still using FullWrite 2.0.6 in Classic mode in OS X Tiger (10.4.11), but am about to get a new MacBook Air with Lion. If anybody has new info about how to open FullWrite files, I’d love to hear.

A friend told me today that he heard that the new version of Pages would open it. My daughter works for Apple and said she would test it.

BTW – I ran down Roy Leban and emailed him a few years ago, and he had no interest whatsoever in helping. Seemed kinda bitter about Akimbo Systems.

I LOVE FullWrite – the best word processor ever.

By: Dick Haight

Dick Haight — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:04:26 +0000

I had converted what I thought was all of my FW files back when I got my first OSX for powerpc. Unfortunately, I missed a few. While going through old equipment to put in salvage I was surprised to find a G3 Powerbook with FW installed. It took some doing but I got an ethernet link made beteen my new Mac and the PB. I copied my files to the PB, ran them through FW (save as MS Word 4.0). Voila, they look fine in my current (2008?) Word. Since I also have Acrobat Pro on my new Mac, I would probably get even better results if I could convert to pdf on the PB. FW doesn’t do “print to pdf”.

BTW: I agree the FW was the best.

By: Ian Glazer

Ian Glazer — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:22:46 +0000

Looks like the host for the free version of FullWrite has indeed gone away. Right now, I am using SheepShaver to run 9.0 inside my 10.6 environment to get FW running. I have posted the version I had along with the original “FullWrite is free page” here.

By: Tom Carder

Tom Carder — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:57:05 +0000

In 1993 I prepared for the publisher (CRC Press) the camera-ready pages of my book, Handling of Radiation Accident Patients by Paramedical and Hospital Personnel, 2nd ed. using FullWrite Professional. Now I need to resurrect the book files but have moved up from MacOS7 to OSX/Classic(9.2) and the FullWrite I have (v1.5s) will not work under X/Classic. Where can I download a version that will work with X/Classic? “ftp.akimbo.com/fullwrite/fullwrite_installer.bin” does not work.

By: Spade Aceman

Spade Aceman — Sun, 24 May 2009 23:08:35 +0000

To run FullWrite to recover and export the contents of the old files (to, say, RTF), you can look into using Classic Mac emulator programs such as Mini vMac, Basilisk II or SheepShaver.

While I never used FullWrite back in the day (I’m looking instead at a mass-conversion of my old ClarisWorks documents), out of curiosity I installed FullWrite to my emulated Mac as well. It seems to run fine on Mini vMac under System 7.5.5, though the screen would probably be a bit small for serious work. (The other emulators would give you options for larger emulated screens.)

For future-proof word processor document formats, I’d recommend the obvious rich text format (.rtf), as well as the open standard OpenDocument text (.odt), which is the native format for Google Docs, OpenOffice.org, and IBM’s Lotus Symphony, to name three. (Of course, if you simply want to save the document for posterity in a read-only mode, you can print it to PDF.)

For a worthy successor to FullWrite, at least from an outlining and organization standpoint, I’d recommend giving Scrivener a try.

By: Ron Nelson

Ron Nelson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:18:34 +0000

As stated above, FullWrite was the best word processor ever produced. I still have FW 2.0.6 on an old iBook G3 running OS-9.2.2. A word processor is made to process words (write as best as possible) and the Thesaurus feature in FullWrite was it’s best asset, bar none. It didn’t only give you lots of alternative words, (syn, rel, con, comp, & ant) but gave parts of speech, definition, correct spelling, historical list, every word, including the part of speech and each word in the definiion was hypertexed into the Thesaurus. The replace button simply replaced the word you looked up with the word that better fit the context or clarity of what you were trying to say. That is the crux of word processing (writing). Try the Thesaurus in AppleWorks 6, Pages, or Microsoft Word (yuck) and they are paltry in comparison to FullWrite.

I wrote to Akimbo some years ago and pleaded with them to upgrade FullWrite to OS-X, even suggesting that I would pay as high as $200.00 for the upgrade (as I suspect others might). I’ve written to other 3rd party word processor vendors and I either got no response or we’ll take it under advisement.

Most of my old FW documents have been moved into AppleWorks V6 but this too is getting a little flukey as it gets left behind. I’m about to order a new dedicated word processing program, because I don’t particularly care to do my writing in a page layout program like Pages. Word Processing is the number one program used on any personal computer. It should be be a product that first and formost does everything possible to help a person write clearly and process words, before it is bloated with colors, fonts, word art, and ultra page layout. The worst part of all is that it would be so simple to include the best Thesaurus ever built into every word processor, because it takes up so little space.

Ron Nelson

By: parkds

parkds — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:12:43 +0000

Also looking for an answer to this question. I just found JAZ drives full of FullWrite documents from college and would love to convert them to something more future proof.