catdoc - A Review By Timothy Swenson catdoc is a Unix program created by Victor Wagner and ported to the QL by Jonathan Hudson. catdoc takes a Microsoft Word file and converts it to plain ASCII text. And that's it. It is a simple program to run, simple to operate, and it does what it says it does. So, why would you need catdoc? For Wintel (Win 3.1, Win95, Win98, & NT) systems, Microsoft Word is THE word processor used. A number of documents are created and distributed in Word format, assuming that most people have access to Micrsoft Word or a Word viewer. For those QLers that don't have access to Word, but do run across Word files, catdoc is the utility to convert the Word files into something more useable for the QL. The catdoc zip file is available from Jonathan's web page 'The Dead Letter Drop' or through the normal freeware distribution channels. The distribution will fit (with a little room left) on a 720K floppy. Before unzipping the distribution, be sure you know how to prevent unzip from converting the dot (.) extensions to underlines. Since catdoc is originally a Unix application it will be expecting files with dot extensions. I unzipped the distribution before I knew of this and had to change a few files by hand. Once unzipped, you will have a number of files and three subdirectories ( src, charsets, & docs). The catdoc executable is found under the src subdirectory. I moved it to the main directory to make it easier to use. Before running catdoc an Environment Variable for letting catdoc know where the character set files are located. Since I had unzipped catdoc on a floppy I set it as: setenv "CATDOCLIB=flp1_charsets_" Now to run catdoc all you need is a Word file. Since I have Word 7.0 on my PC, I copied over my ToDo list (todo.doc) and let catdoc chew on it. The simplest way to execute catdoc is this: exec catdoc;"todo.doc" This will take the file "todo.doc", convert it to ASCII, and display it on the screen. If you want to save the output to a file then execute catdoc like this: exec catdoc;"todo.doc > todo_txt" catdoc does some fairly simplistic reading of the Word file. I noticed in converting my ToDo file a bunch of extra information and text that I had deleted out of the file. It seems that Word keeps some of this version information in the file and when catdoc processes the file it appears. When I converted a simple test file with no revisions, the output from catdoc looked better. I even added a table to the second Word document and catdoc was able to handle it. Any output from catdoc will probably have to be cleaned up before it is presentable. The text file generated by catdoc can easily be imported in to Quill, cleaned up, and formatted to create a final document. So, if you don't have access to Microsoft Word and need to read a Word file on the QL, catdoc is the tool for you. It may not generate a "pretty" document, but it will extract the text information from the Word document.