digesting of Word files

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

Russ W. Urquhart seems to imply (in a thread where I've already spent my
two cents) that there's software that's

>free, open source, . . . are customizable in just about
>every aspect, are small in code size so they perform
>blazingly fast, work with everything i receive from
>everyone else (i.e. word docs, etc.)

Russ, I immediately highlighted the "word docs" bit in that. Like it or
not (and I happen to dislike it intensely), the Word .DOC format seems to
be the de facto standard, and I'd love to be able to deal with it in the
ways you describe.
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Peter Evans