catdoc

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: catdoc
started by: XeRXeS

Posted by XeRXeS on Jan. 05 2005,19:35

There's a project called catdoc @ < http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/ver-0.9.html > which is licensed under the GPL and basically is like the standard *nix cat command, but for MS Word documents. Not infallible of course, but it seems to be pretty tiny (the source tarball is only 119kb) and could possibly be quite handy for addition to DSL for people who need to read the occasional Microsoft file. It also comes with xls2csv, which outputs Excel files in a comma-seperated value (csv) format, which again would be quite handy if you need to read the odd Microsoft file. For less than a meg of source, it's quite worthwhile to have something that lets you read the occasional doc/xls when you have to, imo.

(Disclaimer: I have absolutely nothing to do with the catdoc project, I just think it would be a really useful addition to DSL due to the size and functionality, and I'll probably end up "rolling my own" with it present anyway. :;):

)

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 06 2005,04:07

Or you could try the builtin MSWord reader on the DSL livecd.

It is called antiword and it performs a similar function and can export to PostScript format in addition to text output.

The command line tool is located here:

/usr/local/lib/siag/antiword/antiword

Maybe it would be a good idea to throw a symlink to this file into /usr/bin for a future release of DSL.