anti-word

[Geoff Shang]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:

> I do not understand why you do not just accept what he is ready
> to send you, since you can easily do the conversion yourself. Why
> expect him to do it?

OK, now I've read the whole thread, time for my 2C worth on it.

Yes, the wv lib will give us access to word docs, but I've not found it
100% successful.  For example, I've found files that end in a host of
question marks instead of what should have been there.  Worse, some files
have said something like:

This document was saved 8 times using fastsave.  Some information was
lost.

And that's all it can tell me.  I have to try and do a 'strings' on it, and
man that ain't pretty.  so saying we can read them isn't always true.  I've
only had this with a minority of docs though.

As far as preparing well formatted texts go, it can be done under linux.  I
just created an RTF file from a text file for the first time tonight.  To
save anyone the headache I went through to find out how to do it, the
command is:

enscript -W rtf -p outputfile.rtf inputfile.txt

Actually, enscript looks like it's pretty powerful, but is extremely
lacking in documentation that covers all its features (like that one).

another tool that looks like it might be useful is the simple document
parser sdf.  Apparently, you learn a simple mark-up language and it'll do
the
rest and convert it into lots of formats.  I've not used it, but I intend
to look at it.
and if you want to create fully produced works of literary art, you can't
go past latex.

Geoff.