Ability Write

Ability Write (AWW for documents, AWP for templates) is the native format of the Write program in the Ability Office suite, though this program also supports some other, more widely-used formats.

Templates appear to be in a nearly identical format to documents, producing files of the same length with the main body part identical and some differences in headers and footers.

Current versions of Ability Write can read and write files of both the current 6.x format and an earlier 4.x format.

The format appears to store the text characters of the document contiguously in the middle of the document (with lots of header and footer parts that store other things like fonts and formatting). In the 6.x format, the characters are in a 16-bit encoding, little-endian; ASCII characters show up as their normal values (with extra 00 bytes between them to fill out the 16 bits), but other characters don't seem to be in Unicode values; Greek capital alpha comes out as F041 (byte sequence 41 F0). In the 4.x format, 8-bit characters are used, which is apparently unable to properly store most special non-ASCII characters.

Identification
Files appear to begin with the hex bytes.

Sample files

 * Write4.aww - Test document in Ability Write 4.x format
 * Write6.aww - Test document in Ability Write 6.x format
 * Write6.awp - Test template in Ability Write 6.x format

Other links

 * Wikipedia article on Ability Office
 * Ability Software site