Hello managers,
i've asked:
> Again i ask for possible solutions to read mails from such bloody
> ignorants who don't know that there are other (better!) worlds than
> those WINTEL ones...
>
> Do i have to have a NT-machine (ftp it and print it...) for this task?
> (Then how to automate this?) Or are there other possibilities commercial
> or non-commercial for digital unixers like us?
and i've received numerous responses! Thank you all again!
I'm sorry, that my summary is a bit long...,
nevertheless i did not include all items YOU mentioned to me...
The approach of dealing with WORD-attachments in Emails divides into
several steps:
1.) If that mail comes to you without your request and does not seem to be
of (any/some) interest for you (or your boss :-), you should send it
back (more or less politely or with a flame!), but include a demand
for using non-proprietary formats!
2.) If it's to your advantage to read the mail, and you want to do it on
your digital unix machine, then, if you want to have the complete
structure of the WORD document, you may use
-> an office software, but it's still unclear to me, whether
there is one available for digital unix...
(see below, under "3.)") or
-> "SoftPC/SoftWindows6.0", which i *think* is a Windows-Emulator
under which you may run MS WORD??? (Commercial)
or if you only need the pure text, then you can try to extract it with:
-> the commands "strings" and/or "troff"
(i did not try this one...)
-> "catdoc", which is a free utility written by
Victor Wagner <vitus_at_agropc.msk.su> to produce either cyrillic
or "normal" (=LATIN1 :-) output.
Adri (see below) says, that Victors approach is to eliminate all
control- and special-characters in the hope, that the rest is the
wanted text.
I tried this one (catdoc has been sent to me in 3 different "formats"
one being a complete tar.gz-distribution, which i'm willing to
"redistribute" in the case of interest...) and got good-enough
results, even the structure of a table has been reproduced.
(A bit of post-editing may be/is/was useful though...)
-> "AntiWord", which is also free, but still under devolopment and runs
- at the moment - ONLY on Acorn computers under the RISC OS operating
system, but will be ported to Linux and -maybe- some other unixes in
the future.
See
http://www.winfield.demon.nl/index.html
The approach (of Adri van Os and the AntiWord-Team) is a bit different
to the one of "catdoc" and tries to use the layout information in the
Word file in an attempt to get the text, as the text in a Word file is
not always sequentional.
-> "simeon", which is a (commercial) mail-client with a WORD-capable
mime-interface (???) and may be available under digital unix?
See
http://www.simeon.com/
I've tried to get in contact with the simeon-people, but had no
success until now ... :<)
-> "laola", which is a perl-approach...
See
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/laola.html
There has been an article on laola in the german newspaper iX 5/98
See
http://www.heise.de/iX/artikel/1998/05/163/artikel.html
I did not (yet!) had the time to check out laola, but it sounds as the
most differentiated (unix-)approach to WORD documents i've found...
3.) If it's to your advantage to read the mail, but you want to do it on
another machine than your beloved digital unix one, there are again
different possibilities:
-> Linux-based you can
-> wait until the "AntiWord"-port is ready (see above)
-> use an office software like
-> StarOffice (which is for free in version 4 for Linux!)
See
http://www.stardivision.com or
http://www.stardivision.de
I've tried to get in contact with the StarOffice-people, too,
but had no success neither until now ... :<)
-> applixware
See
http://www.applix.com
-> WINTEL-based (WINdows-something on inTEL-based hardware) you can
obviously use the MS WORD itself or
-> WordPerfect, which can handle WORD (and this way eliminate the
makro-viruses, as i've been told...)
I seem to remember that "once upon a time" there has been a
WordPerfect either for Ultrix or for DigitalUnix, but *now*
i can find only versions for Windows-something... ???
See
http://www.corel.com/
To establish the connection you can use
-> ftp to transfer your files
-> samba to mount on the WINTEL-site a unix-disk
See
http://lake.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba/samba.html
-> a product like NTrigue, WinCenter, pICAsso, Hydra, ...
which allow at an Xterminal to open a Windows-something session
"You have full NT/95 functionality and it behaves like an X windows."
-> SUN (and Solaris) based you can run WABI (which is a WIN...-emulator?)
and under WABI you can run WORD...
Hi, if you're still reading: thank you for your time! I hope it was worth it!
At least i know now, how to start dealing with WORD-words...
With best regards,
Bernt Christandl
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- Bernt Christandl / Max-Planck-Institut fuer extraterrestrische Physik -
- D-85740 Garching / Phone: +49/89/3299-3342 / Fax: +49/89/3299-3569 -
- email: beb_at_mpe.mpg.de -
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Received on Tue May 19 1998 - 14:59:51 NZST