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N0rbert
Asked: 2019-12-21 03:47:30 +0800 CST

Which CLI application should I use to convert Word template (*.dot file) to the plain text?

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I have several Microsoft Word template files. They have *.dot extension:

$ file file.dot
file.dot: Composite Document File V2 Document, Little Endian, Os: Windows, 
Version 6.1, Code page: 1252, Author: user, Template: file.dot, Last Saved By: 
user, Revision Number: 2, Name of Creating Application: Microsoft Office Word, 
Total Editing Time: 01:00, Last Printed: Tue Nov 21 14:41:00 1995, Create
Time/Date: Fri Dec 20 11:46:00 2019, Last Saved Time/Date: Fri Dec 20 11:46:00 
2019, Number of Pages: 3, Number of Words: 300, Number of Characters: 1713,
Security: 0

I need to convert them to plain text using some CLI application.

Is it possible?

command-line libreoffice microsoft-word

2 Answers

  1. You can use LibreOffice in the terminal. 

    soffice --headless --convert-to txt:Text YOUR-DOCUMENT-HERE.DOT

    Check out the sources
    Source1
    Source2

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  2. Best Answer

    There is also antiword (use deb-package), which extracts plain text from old (pre-XML) Word documents in a very efficient, but not always entirely correct way.

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