INSTALLING catdoc 0.91.x Starting with patchlevel alpha 3 catdoc version 0.90 have autoconf configuration. Thanks for Stephen Farell to convince me. So typically you should run ./configure make make install to compile and install catdoc. NOTE for HPUX users. If you want to compile catdoc with aCC, use CC="aCC -Ae" ./configure Configure script for catdoc recognizes following options (apart from standard --prefix, --exec-prefix and so on) --disable-wordview - disables building of Tcl/Tk viewer wordview, which requires X11. (note, it would be disabled automatically, if you don't have appropriate version of Tcl/Tk). You may wish to use this if you don't have X installed. --with-wish=path - specifies path to wish interpreter. This option have two uses 1. If executable named wish, found in your PATH is old, and you have newer wish installed as wish4.2 or wish8.0, you should specify this in order to build wordview viewer 2. If you are compiling catdoc from telnet connection or text console, you can specify this option to skip tcl version check, which would run wish and fail if it couldn't find X display (which would lead configure to assume, that you don't have good wish) --with-input=charset --with-output=charset Allows you to specify charset names to expect in 8-bit word file and to produce as output text file. Do ls ./charsets/*.txt to find out which charsets are provided in distribution. Additional charsets can be obtained from ftp.unicode.org Note that make would fail if you specify charset, which doesn't exist in charset directory. --disable-charset-check By default, make in charsets directory fails, if it is unable to find *.txt files corresponding to default input and output charsets. This option allows you to disable this check. Make in charsets directory would always succeed, but it is your responsibility to provide charset files in catdoc library directory after make install. --disable-langinfo By default, catdoc tries to use your current locale charset as its output charset. It can be, of cource always overriden by command line switch. But charset from the locale takes precedence over charset in configuration file, unless you put use_locale=no into this file. If your C library is not XPG4-compatible, and configure fails to detect it, you can completely disable langinfo support using this switch. If you experience strange and unexpected behavoir of catdoc, try to remove optimization flag (-02) from FLAGS in src/Makefile. If you can write autoconf test to check for this problem, please send it to me. It was known problem with version 0.35 on HP/UX 9, and I scarcely changed my style of writing since.