I just wanted to mention an amazing OS X utility called textutil because someone gave me some data as a bunch of word files! But I needed to keep the data on jones, so I had to be able to work with it in the command line. I did a bunch of searching, and I was reading discouraging reports and starting to lose heart, but then I happened upon the mention of textutil.

All I had to do was type in:

textutil -convert txt -encoding mac *.doc,

and all of my horrible doc files were instantly txt files! It was amazing! Then I discovered this utility is standard with OS X starting with 10.4. So if you too are searching and finding only extremely old converter applications that probably do not work with modern versions of word--since they keep changing their format in order to break converter applications--I hope you find this page and it helps you decide to use textutil for this purpose.

It also has other functions, which I may soon detail in its very own wiki entry.

The simplest use is

textutil -convert txt Some\ File.doc

This produces Some File.txt. You can also specify an output encoding besides UTF-8, though this isn't usually needed.

textutil -convert txt -encoding mac Some\ File.doc

You can convert to

• txt -- plain text
• html -- web pages (no images)
• rtf -- rich text (different fonts, etc, much like html)
• doc -- Word 97-03
• docx -- Word 07-10
• webarchive -- Safari web page package (includes images)
• wordml, odt

I don't know what those last two are, but I am now to learn that odt files are of open document format, which is used by, for example, OpenOffice.