Software to Read/Convert a Folio Infobase File?

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."

Comments

FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE: What to Do with Folio NFOs..

[supton]

Folio NFO files are too much of a niche format to have already been reverse engineered, so you likely want a text dump of the content. This is not a problem, as Folio software does have export abilities.

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 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:Probably Patented

[qnonsense]

• 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.