#20 Is writerperfect able to convert PalmDoc Ebook(.pdb) and QuarkXpress(.qxp) Documents?

[Ryan Qian]

I'm trying to convert .pdb and .qxp file with writerperfect, but failed.

My platform: Gentoo Linux

And I also opened a bug on https://bugs.gentoo.org/835525.

here is the log:

file command:
./example.pdb:    AportisDoc/PalmDOC E-book "example", 2571 bytes uncompressed
./example.qxp:    Intel Quark Express Document (English)

bash -x log:

+ ebook2odt example.pdb example.b.odt
ERROR : Couldn't convert the document
+ ebook2epub example.pdb example.b.epub
ERROR : Couldn't convert the document
+ qxp2odg example.qxp example.q.odg
ERROR: We have no confidence that you are giving us a valid document.
+ qxp2epub example.qxp example.q.epub
ERROR: We have no confidence that you are giving us a valid document.

Is this a bug or just unsupported?
I have tried to ask by mail list, but no reply.

[David Tardon]

I cannot tell without seeing the files. Judging by the errors, the pdb file may be damaged (the AportisDoc format is really simple, so there's not much that could go wrong during parsing), while the qxp file is probably a version not supported by libqxp (libxpp only supports documents written by QuarkXpress 3.0-4.1. One reason is that these versions were the most widespread, the other one is that every version starting with 3.1 added a new obfuscation bits into the file format, making it progressively harder to reverse-engineer; 5.0 takes this to a whole new level and nobody has shown any interest to tackle that yet.)

[Ryan Qian]

Thanks for your reply. For .pdb, here are some examples, and all can be opened by fbreader. For .qxp, I don't know the exact version... maybe the tested file is created by an unsupported version.