Hi, here is what I use. For reading and converting MS Word documents I I use a program called antiword. There is an rpm package for Mandrake Linux which I have also installed on Red Hat as well. It is my understanding Debian has a binary version of antiword as well. The other option I use is Star Office 6.0 with gnopernicus cvs version, but at this point the Star Office accessability isn't vary good.Neither is it vary easy to get gnome 2.2 and gnopernicus going. As for pdf files I installed xpdf package, and use pdftotext to convert pdf files to text files.
