If I was to pose a question to the forum, it would be "How can I access old AppleWorks documents?" However the question is no longer needed and I am able simply to share the answer.

LibreOffice does the job in fine style and it does not seem to care whether the old document was text or drawing. It just opens them. I found that, with a couple, I needed to make an adjustment to the font but that was hardly an issue.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who has faced the AppleWorks quandary and tried pretty much everything else. Happy to pass this along - and kudos to LibreOffice. The software is well worth the donation to their organization.


EDIT: Corrected "does seem to care" to "does not seem to care"

In the past I've used MacLink Plus

But not for quite a while.

"oh, another customer just brought in a stack of floppies, she wants her old poetry on a CD..." "She's getting it on a flash drive. Oh, those are 800k's, hang on, let me fire up the Power Macintosh".

(with surprising frequency...)

I used to use Maclink Plus all the time. To bad it is among the list of long departed applications. Did it ever get updated to run on Intel processors?

Yes. I think it got up to about V16. I stopped paying for upgrades somewhere around V10, by which time it had outlived it's usefulness for me. I had been a user from the very first issue.