Software to Read/Convert a Folio Infobase File? 18
garyebickford writes "Infobase is an application and data format that appears to be very popular among various governmental agencies. It is apparently also used to produce many CD/DVD titles. The 'Folio' software to read and write Infobase files is evidently now produced by NextPage Inc.. (Note: in order to get their page to come up, I had to set Opera to say it was Explorer). In my case, I have been given an Infobase file that contains, to my knowledge, public domain material. However the software to read it is Windows-specific, and I am resistant to the idea of buying a Windows box just to read it. I tried contacting the company that produced the Infobase, but the support number for the company is no longer connected, and their email address bounces. I seem to have an orphan dataset. I have looked fairly extensively for any open source software that can read or write the Infobase format, without success. Does anyone know the format, or (bless you) have an algorithm to unpack the data?"
"Until I began this search, I had never heard of Infobase. After seeing 12,400 hits on Google (search for "Infobase document"), mostly for Infobase documents on web servers, mostly for the information archives of regional and city governments, I believe that an Infobase reading and writing tool could be a valuable open source project, especially considering that presently Infobase is entirely a Windows product.
Another factor is that the Folio Infobase has now been around ten years. One might worry that without a second source, all those Infobase files could be lost if the existing software is no longer supported at some point."
buy it. (Score:2, Insightful)
with all the hungry programmers out there right now someone will jump at it.
wine? (Score:2)
What's the real goal, to be able to open this file (and presumably others like it) without touching windows? Why not emulate it? or don't you have a copy of the software either?
Probably Patented (Score:2, Informative)
So don't do it in the U.S. unless you have a large legal budget or know the status of the patents and owners.
IANAL.
Re:Probably Patented (Score:2)
Reverse engineering is completely legal in the US.
Re:Probably Patented (Score:4, Interesting)
- Reverse engineering is completely legal in the US.
True. There is nothing illegal about reverse engineering a file format (or anything else for that matter) for the purposes of interoperability (witness Kerberos). But...Unfortunately, reverse engineering's not all that's involved in this case. As our original poster said, the algorithm's patented. So while it'd be fine to reverse engineer the file format and algorithm in the US, distributing a viewer which contains the patented algorithm (and it must in order to work), sure as hell isn't.
At least in the good ol' US of A. (The rest of the world isn't so stupid as to allow software patents. But you know US !)
You do remember a little algotithm called RSA, don't you? Hint: Theo de Raadt lives in Canada for a reason.
It looks like they offer some kind of an API... (Score:3, Informative)
Contacting the company (Score:3, Flamebait)
<irony>
Well thank $DEITY you didn't use open-source software, because there are all sorts of support issues with that!
</irony>
Seriously, though, if the company is still in business, it shouldn't be that hard to contact them. Look at their domain records for contact info, business directories for their area, etc.
Re:Contacting the company (Score:1, Flamebait)
Umm, yes, that was my whole point. Did you miss the irony tags? When comparing Open-Source Software to closed source software, OSS is often unfairly accused of being unsupported. This is an example that clearly demonstrates that going with closed-source software that uses a proprietary file-format is the risky option, not OSS, in terms of support.
FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE: What to Do with Folio NFOs.. (Score:5, Informative)
You likley want to get your hands on a copy of Folio Views for Windows or Macintosh. First, keep in mind that there are differences between the 3.x and 4.x infobases. You need to find out which version of Folio products produced your infobase. If nothing else, Folio Views 4.x will read the older NFO files. You want to export the infobase from Folio Views to a Folio Flat File (FFF, very simple SGMLish, but not quite SGML text).
You will likely need to buy this from an OEM, since NextPage stopped producing this a long time ago. Here's the history: Folio was the default search engine for Netware many moons ago, and was popular, and then had DOS, then 16-bit windows versions of their "Views" product (2.x and 3.x line). Folio was purchased by Lexis-Nexis, and then sold to OpenMarket, who didn't want it, and eventually sold it back to its original founders, who changed the name of the company to NextPage. During the time it was at OpenMarket, a 4.x version of Views was released, which is win32 (and also MacOS app).
FYI, FFF is very easy to work with. I've written text filters to work with it, and it's as easy as any other decently-marked-up format, even if it is not SGML. I do not know of any way to get an NFO out to FFF without a copy of Views.
Tip: My former employer NewsView Solutions [newsviewsolutions.com] is one of the few OEMs still selling Folio-branded products, and still uses the Folio Views 4.x products alongside with their digital asset management software. They could sell you a copy of Views (I forget about pricing).
Re:FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE: What to Do with Folio NFO (Score:2, Informative)
Re:FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE: What to Do with Folio NFO (Score:2)
Heck, I think I still have a Netware 4.x CD laying around here somewhere if this is important and you think it will work.
Folio Information (Score:3, Informative)
With their v2 dos-based infobases, they had a free viewer that could open the contents and dump out a txt file.
With their v3 16-bit based software/infobases, they also had a viewer for 3.0 infobases, but stopped it when they started v3.1x infobases. Fortunately, the 3.0 viewer could read the 3.1x infobases, but it wasn't widely distributed.
With their v4 32-bit based software/infobases, they greatly improved the performance of the database, increased it's total size, and brought the UI up to the "standard" win32 interface.
They have proprietary compression algorithms to compress the built infobases. The APIs that are available from the company are only into the
You can include images and even raw data like Excel spreadsheets into the infobase so you can share a single file and it has all the data inclusive to itself. It's a very powerful format.
There is also the ability (within the infobase itself) to lock down the contents even to the point where a user can't co a ctrl-c to copy text to the clipboard, or prevent an "export" of text out to
As for Folio on linux, I've heard win4lin can run Folio just fine. But, you have to have a copy of Folio Views.
http://www.thefiengroup.com sells Folio, but their website is a bit screwed up right now. $150 for the "viewer" program, and $2000 for the developer software (with html/doc/wpd/txt/etc import/convert/compile/build/manage features). Then there is the $2000 Publisher software that actually makes the CD-ROM installation binaries for a product. Then, there is a 5% per copy sale tax with quarterly updates back to Folio. So, it's targeted to data publishers for products.
The Folio Flat File format is SGML-derived. I write a lot of perl scripts to take OCR'd text or html and convert them to properly marked up
So, the moral of the story is: If you could come up with a flat file sourced database with an OpenOffice front end to it with full regexp/wildcard/thesaurus/boolean searching down to user-specified context (string/paragraph/article/monthly/entire database), you could have a killer ap for the publishing business. Acrobat PDF is great for brochures and such, but when you have 2GB of text, Folio beats anything out there for less than $25,000 to combine/search/manage/filter it, which it does extremely well and fast.
Ryan
buy a different Folio product? (Score:1)