The Zip file here contains software to convert CHI files generated by ChiWriter version 3 from Horstmann into rich text format (RTF) on a Windows 10 platform. Such files can then be opened, edited and printed in Word or WordPad. There are options to select all or a subset of CHI files from the chosen directory, or all CHI files in the current folder and all its sub-folders. For each file <name>.CHI, a file <name>.rtf is created in the same directory, (with additional digit characters if necessary to avoid over-writing existing files of the same name.) A log file is also created listing any issues with the conversion of each file. A version for running in Windows XP is given here.
There are some limitations. These involve primarily the occurrences of subscripts and superscripts. Specifically, only the first line of superscripts and subscripts are processed, i.e. superscripts of superscripts and subscripts of subscripts are ignored. Also, subscripts placed immediately below superscripts are omitted. A tiny number of symbols don't seem to have Unicode equivalents. Further, unlike ChiWriter, lines in the RTF do not have a fixed number of characters, and so any special left indentation of paragraphs may have been lost, as well as the centering of some line contents. Finally, with different paging in the RTF than in ChiWriter, some page-specific headers and footers have had to be omitted.
On the plus side, some attempt has been made to make accented characters from the Foreign and Greek fonts match the style and size of the rest of the words in which they sit.
Most other minor issues and choices such as type face and font size are easily sorted by editing the RTF file in Word or WordPad. WordPad is a cheap and cheerful product, but it ignores some RTF features such as page dimensions and horizontal lines which may appear in the converted files. Those mentioned appear in Word, but Word has its own issues. In particular, depending on the fonts available on the platform used, it may not render some standard Unicode characters correctly. The most likely to be affected are “Double-Stroke” (i.e. Blackboard font) letters from the MathII font, such as B (𝔹) for the Booleans. These are the only characters outside the “Basic Multilingual Plane” (BMP).
The conversion program is written in Delphi and was compiled using Embarcadero® Delphi 10.1 Berlin. You just need to extract the file CW2RTF.exe and run it. In that case, just ignore the other files in the zip file. However, if you are worried about the security of executing the program, you should examine the source code CW2RTFMain.pas in the Zip file and then re-compile it using a free trial version of Delphi.
ChiWriter 4 files have a different format and cannot be converted using this program. There are other programs for converting ChiWriter files, such as those given by and . Most of these translate into Latex or WordPerfect but may not run under Windows 10. This program is for those who don't want to have to learn or use Latex and are stuck with Windows 10.