Re: Emacs as a word processor (ways to convert Word/RTF proprietary files)

[Jean Louis]

* Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> [2020-12-25 07:38]:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
> I'm not going to fight against support for Word files.

- in my opinion both Word and RFT are not necessary for Emacs as that
  just acknowledges proprietary formats and tells users message that
  shall not be told from GNU programs. But there are already
  possibilities to convert Word programs to and from, see below.
 
- there are Word importing capabilities by using other available free
  software. Emacs could advise users to install some external software
  to convert from Word.

- one of best for me personally is `antiword' it just extracts simple
  text. But I have no Word files on computer.

- another good one is Abiword which has Word import/export
  capabilities on the command line. So a simple Emacs function of few
  lines could already use Abiword as external convertor and import file
  into Emacs word processing

>From Abiword manual page:

        -t DEST, --to=DEST
                Convert the  given file to another  format, writing the
                result to  DEST.  The format  of DEST is  determined by
                its extension.
                See also --to=FORMAT and --to-name.

        -t FORMAT, --to=FORMAT
                Convert the given files(s)  to the given format. Unless
                explicitly  specified  with   --to-name,  the  original
                filename will  be used (with a  different extension, if
                necessary). See also EXAMPLES.

                The more popular values for FORMAT include:

                        lb      lx.
                        abw     T{
                        Abiword XML format (zabw for gzip, bzabw for bzip2 
compression)
                        T}
                        dbk     DocBook XML
                        doc     Microsoft Word binary format
                        docx    T{
                        Office Open XML (newer Microsoft Word versions)
                        T}
                        html    Hypertext Markup Language
                        kwd     KWord
                        odt     OpenDocument Text
                        pdf     Portable Document Format
                        rtf     Rich Text Format
                        sxw     OpenOffice.org Writer 1.0
                        txt     Plain text