65
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

My old man has a bunch of .dox stuff saved. He has complicated large files saved that are not supported by any of the FOSS conversion tools. I've tried Libre office, Abi Word, and every command line tool and converter I can find. These are entire book sized files.

I have a W10 machine with Word. Is extracting the .exe and running it with wine feasible without making an epic mess or massive project of this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 months ago

Assuming the latest version of OpenOffice doesn't work for these files...


My next course of action would be using the Win 10 machine with Word, or a VM with Win10 or 11 and the latest version of Word. Use MASGrave to trick M$ into considering it licensed if you need to.

Use a Powershell script to interact with Word through the COM object interface and automate opening Word, opening the file, saving it as a different filetype, and closing. Here's a snippet of Powershell from Reddit for going in the opposite direction (odt to docx) for a single file. I wouldn't try to do this through Linux, just suck it up and use Windows so you don't have an extra layer of mess to deal with.

Going off M$ documentation of the save types enum, I would replace "wdFormatDocumentDefault" in that snippet with wdFormatOpenDocumentText or wdFormatStrictOpenXMLDocument, then test it with a single file to see which gives the output you need.

Getting all the files of the starting type from a folder can be done using Get-ChildItem. Store those in a variable and use a foreach loop over the initial file list.

this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
65 points (86.5% liked)

Linux

48210 readers
719 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS