Comments on: Four console document converters

By: Blasphemer! DOSBox and Word 5.5 « Motho ke motho ka botho

Blasphemer! DOSBox and Word 5.5 « Motho ke motho ka botho — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:17:25 +0000

[...] for the time being I shall continue to use antiword and vim together to read or edit Word files, and I will leave the eternal search for the holy grail of Linux console [...]

By: More for the console: vlock, catdoc and more « Motho ke motho ka botho

More for the console: vlock, catdoc and more « Motho ke motho ka botho — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:43:58 +0000

[...] mentioned some document converters the other day, then found two or three more: catdoc, wordview and word2x. catdoc is still in the [...]

By: quigybo

quigybo — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:47:56 +0000

Both PKGBUILDs point to the wvWare project page, but I have been using wv without wv2 installed, so while they are from the same project they are independent packages. If you look at the file list for wv2 on the Arch packages page it is just a bunch of header files and a .so.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:29:37 +0000

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure. The PKGBUILD points at the wv2 pages, unless I am mistaken. But both projects seem to be linked, so it may be that installing one implies the other, or that one has functions that overlap the other. You might have to peek at the PKGBUILDs to be sure.

By: quigybo

quigybo — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:10:59 +0000

I have to say I’m impressed with wv, it does a much better job of converting docs than catdoc. Plus it can do latex, html, pdf etc, which is handy if the file has images in it (not that a resume would but some of the files I get sent do). And as far as gnome dependencies go, libgsf isn’t that bad as it doesn’t drag the rest in with it.

On arch it is the package wv and not wv2 that has the executables, wv2 seems to be a library?

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:19:26 +0000

You’re correct; I should have been clear about that in the post. I was in too much of a hurry to make a pitch for Siag. Thank you for making a note of that. Cheers!

By: foo

foo — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:16:57 +0000

@ghazal: check out pdftotext and pdftohtml from poppler.

By: Ibrahim Ghazal

Ibrahim Ghazal — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:03:53 +0000

That’s the problem with management, you can never please everyone. You prefer plain text resumes (and I admire you for that,) but others might think of using plain text as a sign of being unprofessional, lazy, or lacking in technical skills. Personally, if I ever had to apply for a job, I’d send my resumes in many different formats and let the employer take their pick.

Also, I once thought of using troff and formatting my resume like a man page (‘career objectives’ in the SYNOPSIS section, ‘skills’ in the OPTIONS section, etc.,) but I never got around to doing it. What would you think if someone did that?

Speaking of document converters, do you know of any programs that convert pdf to text?

By: martintxo

martintxo — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:58:28 +0000

Ah! and don’t forget the venerable catdoc for M$ word to text conversions!!. Thats what I use for word, and for openoffice odt2txt.

By: martintxo

martintxo — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:42:29 +0000

For the openoffice odt to text conversion, in Debian we use odt2txt. It says thath can handle the “new” .odt format, and the old .sxw. It also extracts text from spreadsheets presentations too. The old o3read is only for convert .sxw and such “old format” files. (almost that saids it website).