Word files in the command line
Wednesday, March 1, 2006, 02:33 PM - Apt-get Install
Antiword is a nifty application that can convert Word documents to plain text, PostScript, and PDF. According to the developer, conversion to DocBook XML is still experimental and doesn't always work well.
Antiword is very flexible. It can read and convert files created with Word versions 2.0 to 2003, and you can run it on multiple operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, RISC OS, FreeBSD, and OpenVMS. On top of that, you can set the paper size for documents converted to PostScript or PDF, include any text that was removed from the file (but which Word notoriously keeps a record of), and display any hidden text.
For the most part, you'll just want to view a Word document. To do that, you just have to type the following command:
antiword file.doc
The Word document will be converted to text and printed to the screen. If you're running Antiword in a terminal window, you'll have to scroll up to view the full text of the document. To get around this, you can pipe the output from Antiword to the less utility, which will allow you to scroll through the document page by page from the top:
antiword file.doc | less
Antiword
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Wednesday, March 1, 2006, 04:32 PM
Of course, one should always remind people that using Word is no less than discourteous. If you receive them, one can always answer as proposed at the end of Stallman's article [1], for example, the reply of Reverend Father Martin Sylvester [2] is quite non-technical.
It is great that there is a Windows version (cool logo [3]), since windows users are by far the most affected by word documents.
In the future, I will point them to this useful program that can save their day. I think they will prefer this rather than being directed to some annoying explanation about why word is bad [4], won't they?
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sylvester-response.html
[3] http://www.winfield.demon.nl/gfx/DontDoWindows.gif
[4] (In Spanish) WARNING! annoying popups! WARNING! http://www.dc.fi.udc.es/os/~afyanez/Practicas/practicas-doc.html
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