🚀 go-pugleaf

David Boston <bosto@ozemail.com.au> writes:
|
| On a related note - does anyone out there know if there are macros for
| vi or emacs allowing them to display text that is in microsoft's
| document format?

I wrote this quickie program when people started sending me one- or
two-paragraph Word documents as mail attachments.  It is handy, but
loses any fancy formatting though.  I call the program "mwd", so to run
it in a shell:

    mwd blah.doc

----------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
# (Attempt to) Translate Microsoft Word document into text and view with
# the pager.

cat "$@" |
tr "\015\221\222\223\224" "\012\`'\"\"" |	# Newlines, apostrophes, quotes
tr -s '\007\377\013\014' ' ' |
tr -dc '[:space:][:print:]' |
fmt -80 -s |
${PAGER:-more}
----------------------------------------------------------------------

It is incredibly wasteful to send short messages as Word attachments.
The worst case I have seen was 373 bytes of text, add header and
signature, redundant for a mail message (579 bytes), put into Word .DOC
format (11264 bytes), and uuencoded for mail (15550 bytes), so that only
2.3% of the package was content.  This was then sent to a "broadcast"
mail address (expanded into the "to" field -- 28k bytes) and copied to
the mailbox of everyone in the company (somewhere between 14 and 28 MB).

If anyone can beat this, I'd like to hear about it.