word documents

[Geoff Shang]

Hi,

For viewing word docs, you can either use catdoc (in the Debian catdoc 
package) or wvWare (in the wv package).

catdoc, like cat, will output to standard output.  This means you can view 
docs by typing something like:

catdoc filename.doc |less

and output to a file by typing:

catdoc filename.doc >filename.txt

wvWare installs a number of programs to deal with MS Word files.

I use the following to convert to text:

wvText filename.doc filename.txt

Note the capital T in the above example.

For converters like these, I highly recommend installing them both, as 
sometimes one will do better than the other on a specific file.

I am not aware of anything for the command line which outputs in word 
format, but I've not gone looking for such a thing either.

Geoff.