Re: digesting of Word files

["Russ W. Urquhart" urqurw@xxxxxxxx]

Peter,


Within the gist of my post, my email tool, mutt, enables me to handle every
file that is attached and sent to me. Because of the structure of mutt, you
tell it, actually in the same manner that you tell netscape or any other
browser, how to handle mime types.

In the case of word i can handle it one of two ways. Generally i save the
file, as is in Word format, and open it up in Star Office, a free, office
suite that reads and writes MS formats.

Another method is that there are some open source file veiwers that read the
Word format. (Think of them as a less or more that understands Word.)

In either case i could have my mail tool open and execute the program.since
i don't get that many files, i usually just download them and read at my
convience.

If all else fails, i DO have a copy of Word 95, on the PC that is next to my
workstation and i can download them to there. But i just found out, having
gotten and RTF file from a Word 2000 user, that the RTF (Standardized for
eveyone by MS) is now slightly different than the RTF used by Word95, so
beware.)

also on http://www.fefe.do:80/muttfaq/faq.html.gz

They list several word converters, in addition to Star Office. (I haven't
tried these so can't comment on them.) But it's good to know that there are
some alternatives to MS' "Innovations" :)


fwiw,


Russ



On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 10:43:20PM +0900, Peter Evans wrote:
> 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.
> :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> Peter Evans