“As a Linux user, there are times when you have to play nicely
with users of Windows or Mac OS–such as when they send you
Microsoft Word files. When you receive a Word file, you can either
follow Richard Stallman’s advice and refuse it, or bite the bullet
and work with it. Modern Linux word processors–such as
OpenOffice.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, and TextMaker–can deal with
most Word files. But if you don’t want to fire up a word processor
in order to read or print the document, you can turn to the command
line. A handful of small but powerful Linux command line utilities
make viewing, printing, and even converting Word files to another
format a breeze.“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…”
Related Story:
Linux.com:
CLI Magic: Antiword(Mar 08, 2005)