Antiword

 is Article description::a program for displaying legacy Microsoft Word documents in common use from MS Word 97 – 2007 as plain text. Typically, antiword is used to display MS Word documents in a terminal window often in combination with standard Linux tools such as  and. Additionally, it has the ability to extract images from MS Word documents and save them to disk.

Despite the fact that development of has stagnated and there have been no releases since 2005 it is nonetheless frequently used by other software packages to handle legacy MS Word documents. For example, the desktop publishing software Scribus uses antiword as an import filter for documents and users of the text-based email client  frequently use it to display such documents in the terminal as well.

Environment variables

 * ANTIWORDHOME the location of antiword's configuration files.
 * COLUMNS the width of output unless overridden by the -w option.

Files

 * - Global (system wide) configuration files for mapping code pages to UTF-8 output.
 * - This file may contain a path which specifies an alternate location for code page map files; $ANTIWORDHOME is preferred.

cannot find its home directory
This is a known issue with that comes up most often in hosted environments. The solution is to set ANTIWORDHOME to the location of its configuration files, usually.

Limitations

 * While quite usable, Antiword is far from complete and cannot render complex layouts or obscure formatting to a text terminal without compromise.
 * predates Microsoft Office XML formats and therefore lacks support for the file format entirely.
 * cannot tell the difference between a file that cannot be read and a file that does not exist.
 * long predates the XDG Base Directory Specification so it lacks direct support for it.