Antiword is a
free software
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...
reader for
proprietary Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...
documents, and is available for most
computer platforms. Antiword can convert the documents from Microsoft Word version 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 to
plain text
In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ( floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a lim ...
,
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...
,
PDF
Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...
, and
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
/
DocBook
DocBook is a Semantics (computer science), semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of docume ...
(experimental).
Overview
The Word format is
proprietary and only officially supported on
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
and
Macintosh
Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...
operating systems. Reading the format on other systems can be difficult or impossible. Antiword was created to support reading this format on these systems.
Using the plain text output of Antiword, a Word document can be processed and filtered using
shell script
A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipu ...
s traditional text tools such as
diff
In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but i ...
and
grep
grep is a command-line utility for searching plaintext datasets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (global regular expression search and print), which has the same effect. grep was originally de ...
.
[Linux.com's "CLI Magic: Antiword]
CLI Magic: Antiword
/ref> It can also be used to filter Word document spam.[Nabble Forum]
Development has stagnated and no official release has been made since 2005.
As of 2024, the web sit
www.winfield.demon.nl
has disappeared. However, a copy of the source code is now available as .
See also
* wv - library for converting Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...
files.
Office Image Extraction Wizard
References
External links
Official Website
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210120161259/http://www.winfield.demon.nl/ , date=2021-01-20
Document viewers
Cross-platform free software
Free PDF software