After many, many years of using Applix Words for documents at home, I have just become aware that FC5 no longer includes the C++ library I needed to continue running the old Applix binary.  It was bound to happen.  But I need to convert those old documents (all of them Applix Words – my Sheets I've already converted to Gnumeric because it reads those just fine) into something I can use with OpenOffice (my new word processor of choice).  There are no import filters for Applix Words in OpenOffice that I can find.  KWord says it supports the format, but after I tried opening my very simple document (nothing much more than a formatted letter), I found the results to be fairly poor.

The answer comes from Applix, or rather the new owner VistaSource.  They now have a Home User Edition that is fully functionally (as far as I can tell) and free for home use.  That's fine with me.  I just need to convert my old documents to RTF.  And so I did.  Now I can read them into OpenOffice just fine.

Of course, this wasn't a simple solution.  The Applix binary expects a C++ library named libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3, but there is no such beast that I can find on FC5 using yum.  Fortunately, a simple symlink from the existing C++ library, /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3, over to /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 fixes that problem.  

I make note of this in case any other old Applix users were wondering how to get their documents over to OpenOffice.  I'd keep using Applix – I've used it since the early 90's – but I just don't know what the fate of this suite will be.  I go with open source (re: Open Office) because I think that with the source available and an active community behind it, the project will never die.  But you never know.