There are Word document viewers for Linux console. The one I use is called wv. Another is called antiword. No doubt, there are more. Because Word is a proprietary format, and the specification is not available, the authors of programs such as wv have had to reverse-engineer a bit. Because of this, certain things in the Word document may not decode as well as we'd like. Nonetheless, I use wv and get reasonable results when converting from Word to html. The resulting html source is quite bloated, but, it's there. For pdf conversion, there's pdftotext. This is part of the xpdf package, and may already be on your system. Surprise, it was already on my stock installation of RH 7.2. the one thing I don't like about pdftotext-s rendering, is that hyperlinks get lost. To preserve the navigability of pdf documents, I visit <access.adobe.com>, and submit the url of a pdf document (assuming I've found it on the web) to the form. What comes back is a nice html rendering (links and all). Hope this helps, -Dave
