Antiword is a software that converts MS-Word documents to ASCII and Postscript formats.
One of the great features of Antiword is its ability to maintain the layout of the original document during conversion. Additionally, the programmers' version of Antiword is available under the popular GNU General Public License. If you're not familiar with this license, you can find more information on the pages of the Free Software Foundation.
One thing to note about the programmers' version is that it does not contain any binaries. However, the source code is available and can be used to compile a Linux version of the software. The same source code can also be used to compile Antiword on most variations of the Unix operating system, including FreeBSD, Solaris, IRIX, Digital Unix (OSF/1), AIX, SCO, and HP-UX.
Among the many conversion options available in Antiword, you can convert Word documents to plain text, PostScript, PDF, and XML/DocBook. It's worth noting, though, that currently the conversion to XML/DocBook is still experimental, and there's limited support for the Cyrillic alphabet.
That said, the latest release of Antiword includes some exciting new features. You can now display page headers and footers for PostScript and PDF output, and there are new "footnote" tags in XML/DocBook output. Additionally, there's support for text removed by the revisioning system, and the KDE helper script kantiword has been further improved.
All in all, if you need a free and reliable MS-Word reader for Linux, RISC OS, or DOS, you won't go wrong with Antiword.
Version 0.37: N/A