Open a FullWrite Professional document
If a relative wrote seriously on a Mac in the late 1980s or early 1990s — a memoir, a dissertation, business correspondence — there’s a fair chance the files came out of FullWrite Professional. Today nothing on a modern computer will open them, and the files usually have no extension to hint at what they are. This page fixes that. Drop the file here and our converter reads it directly, turning it into a .odt document you can open in Word, LibreOffice, or Pages, or into plain text if you just want the words. Everything happens inside your browser: the converter is a small engine (about 2MB) that downloads once and then works even offline. Your file is never uploaded anywhere, and the original is never modified.
About FullWrite Professional
FullWrite Professional was one of the most ambitious word processors ever written for the classic Mac. Developed by Ann Arbor Softworks and announced with great fanfare, it shipped in 1988 — famously late, and famously huge, demanding a full megabyte of RAM at a time when many Macs had half that. What buyers got in exchange was remarkable: true WYSIWYG page layout, footnotes and endnotes, margin notes, change bars, and an integrated outliner, years before mainstream rivals caught up. Ashton-Tate, the database giant behind dBASE, acquired it to be their Mac word processor, but corporate turmoil and the program’s appetite for memory kept it a cult favorite rather than a bestseller. The rights later passed to Akimbo Systems, which kept it alive through the mid-1990s before it quietly disappeared. The documents it left behind are dense, richly formatted files that no modern application reads natively — which is exactly why the Document Liberation Project’s libmwaw filters, the same ones used by LibreOffice, are so valuable here.
Frequently asked questions
Is my document uploaded to a server?
No. The conversion engine runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly. Your file never leaves your computer, and after the first visit the tool even works offline. Nothing is stored, logged, or transmitted.
My file has no extension. Will it still work?
Yes. Classic Mac files often have no extension at all — the Mac didn’t need them. The converter identifies FullWrite documents by reading the file’s internal structure, not its name. BinHex (.hqx) wrappers from old downloads are handled too.
Will the converted file open in Microsoft Word?
Yes. The output is a .odt file, which opens in Word, LibreOffice, and Apple Pages. Formatting — fonts, styles, footnotes — is preserved wherever it can be recovered from the original.
FullWrite had footnotes, endnotes, and margin notes. Do those survive?
Footnotes and endnotes are recovered and placed as proper notes in the .odt output. Margin notes and other annotations are recovered as text where the file structure allows, so nothing your relative wrote is silently dropped.