Q: Script / Automator for conversion of Apple Works docs to .odt docs With about 2500 AppleWorks docs, dating back to 1995, which I cannot open in the newly purchased Apple Pages ( but with LibreOffice), I need a script or some other automation to do it. (Most of the AW docs are textdocs, some are spreadsheets, those LibreOffice cannot open yet).
So I need some (shell?) Script / Automator assistence.
Something like this:
-> go to folder XY (this can be done manually)
-> find next Apple Works doc > open it with LibreOffice > save it as .odt in some folder > open next one…
/
Wouldn't it be nice to let the computer do the work?!
with best regards,
Omar K N
Stockholm, Sweden

A: Well, 2 answers came in on another bulletin,
1st by fosnola:
Hello,
one solution can be to use the LibreOffice command tool line ( see http://blog.vogella.com/2012/02/27/batch-converting-libreoffice-documents-into-p df/ ), ie. to type in a Terminal windows something like:
 /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --invisible --nologo --convert-to odt *.cwk

to convert all files *.cwk to odt
Another solution can be to modify mwawOSX ( @ sourceforge.net > projects > libmwaw > files ), an AppleScript which called the libmwaw, the filter that LibreOffice uses...
--------------------------------..--------------------------------
2nd by VilingOSX:
On OS X 10.9.2, the LibreOffice 4.2.3.3 command-line (Terminal) syntax for converting a pure AppleWorks 6.2.9 WP document to the following formats:
MS Word .docx
/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to docx:"MS Word 2007 XML" --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx.cwk
PDF
/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export --outdir ~/Desktop alice_6.2.9_osx.cwk
A couple of paragraphs of the conversion result shown in Pages v5.2 from the output Word document.
...[LINK]
And the following is a .docx from an MS Windows AppleWorks v5 document conversion, changing only the alice cwk with lorem_v5_win.cwk:
...[LINK]
If you have mixed text and graphics, your mileage will vary on the quality of the output.
--------------------------------..--------------------------------
Will have to test which is better.
/
Omar KN

A: Here's a different approach entirely. If you have any Virtual Machine software (like VMWare), grab yourself a copy of Snow Leopard Server. It has to be server to run in a VM, but given it's age, I think you may be able to find a copy for a bit less than the original $500/$1000 price tags.
Once you have a Snow Leopard machine running in your VM (which you can run on any modern Mac), now you can install the last version of AppleWorks on it! Snow Leopard can still run PPC apps through rosetta. 
This doesn't fully solve your problem, you still need to make an applescript. But you can make a script that works on AppleWorks directly, "saving-as" all of your documents to the appropriate type. Maybe .rtf for text and .xls for spreadsheets.
