Linux Desktop Hacks

View Microsoft Word Documents in a Terminal #52

Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment

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HACK

wv, the All-Purpose Word Converter

There is a way to retain at least some of the original formatting while print-

ing the document to the screen. For this, you need a set of utilities under the

name of wvWare. You can find the home page for wvWare at http://wvware.

sourceforge.net. Packages of wvWare are readily available for almost all

Linux distributions, although the package name is usually just wv. For

example, if you don’t already have it installed on your system, you can

install wv in Debian Linux with this command:

# apt-get install wv

Users of the yum package can get the RPM version of wv with this command:

# yum install wv

w3m, the All-Purpose Web Browser/Pager

That’s not all you need for this hack. You also need a popular pager/browser

called w3m. Packages of w3m should be available for most Linux distribu-

tions, and the package name is usually w3m. For example, you can install

w3m in Debian Linux with this command:

# apt-get install w3m

Users of the yum package can get the RPM version of w3m with:

# yum install w3m

The w3m program is rather unique in that it is a web browser that works

like a pager—that is, you can pipe text into w3m and use w3m to simply

page back and forth through the text. Some versions of w3m even render

graphics in a frame-buffer console without having an X Windows desktop

running. ...