Re: How to read a word 7 file?

[sjc@debian.org]

On Tue, Jun 23, 1998 at 11:26:18AM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
> 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

This has one major flaw to it.... It may not give you a RECENT copy of the
data (unless the "QucikSave" option was OFF...but how often is that the case?)
<Storytime setting="The largest research Hospital in the country">
A few months back I was called to check out a problem someone had with
a file, word document. Whenever they tried to open it they got
an "Out of Memory error" even tho it was at best 200-300 k in size.
(They also admitted to just recently cleaning a virus from it)

This was of course the ONLY copy of the file, on someones floppy 
disk, and of course there was a grant pending. I figured there
was nothing left to loose, so I opened it up in Simpletext (this
was a mac). I found a rather large text document, with long lines
but it was complete with bibliography et al. I told him 
"This is the best I can do for you"

The next thing the man did was practically cry. He said "This is the
original document I got 2 weeks ago, it doesn't have ANY of my changes"
He had worked 10 hours a day for 2 weeks on this 1 document, and now
he is back to square one with the grant deadline breathing down
is neck.
</storytime>
<moral> ALways use full save, and better yet Don't use MS Word. 
else strings may not give you the output you want </moral>

<NB> The "Don't use MS Word" warning goes doubly so
for current Macintosh versions, just the other day there was a warning
on BUGTRAQ (thats where I saw it anyway) warning that MS Word
uses rather random bits of machine memory to fill in buffers...
so on one of those files, strings may even bring up some
passwords etc </NB>

-Steve


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