RE: How to read a word 7 file?

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>]

On 22-Jun-98 Luiz Otavio L. Zorzella wrote:
> 
> Hi, folks.
> 
> Is there any way to read in my linux box a word 7 .doc file?
> Mantaining the "indents" and "bolds" would be a plus, but mainly I
> just need to read the text in it.
> 
> I use StarOffice to read docs, but it only reads up to word 6 files
>:^<

A rough-and-ready way to do just what you're asking is to use the "strings"
command:

   strings wordfile.doc > wordfile.txt

and then edit wordfile.txt to clean it up. Raw "strings" will skip sequences of
fewer than 4 ASCII characters but these are unlikely to occur in a Word
document. This method will suppress all formatting info except end-of-line, so
you are likely to get long lines (= Word paragraphs). It will also fail to
recognise any non-US-ASCII character codes (above 127) so accented characters
and special symbols, etc, will be missed. But if you simply need to read the
text content of a Word document containing plain English text, then this method
works fine.

Hope this helps,

Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Date: 23-Jun-98                                       Time: 11:26:18
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