It is now accompanied by xls2csv - program which converts Excel spreadsheet into comma-separated value file
Optionaly, catdoc is able to translate some non-ASCII chars into correspoindig TeX escape sequences and convert charsets from Windows ANSI codepage to local codepage of target machine. (Because catdoc is russian program, by default it converts cp1251 to koi8-r, when running under UNIX and to cp866 when running under DOS.
Catdoc has rudimentary table handling. In TeX mode it inserts & when encounters field delimiter and \\ when encounters end of table row. No table headers are produced although.
Catdoc doesn't even try to preserver MS-Word character formatting. It's goal is to extract plain text and allow you to read it and, probably, reformat with TeX, according to TeXnical rules, most Word users haven't even heard about.
If you are looking for tool which would preserve word formatting, look to wvWare or some portable office suite like OpenOffice.org.
xls2csv does roughly same for Excel files. It extracts data and leaves out any formatting info and formulas. Concept is that you want to see data, not the way it was created. Since version 0.94 program catppt which prints out text from PowerPoint files is also included
There is no support for catdoc under Windows
Not because I hate windows. Just because I don't use it. Note that DOS catdoc is not intended to be used under windows. For example, it doesn't support long file names.Catdoc doesn't use system provided charset conversion libraries. It might be considered a bug, but Oracle, Tcl and Perl do the same. Portable software really doesn't have any other choice, because some operating systems, which claim to be POSIX-compatible do not provide support for all neccessary encodings via their iconv(3) function.
Catdoc doesn't introduce its own incompatible format of charset descriptions. Instead it uses encoding description files, available from Unicode Consortium FTP site
Catdoc encoding conversion system has unique feature - it is able to replace character, which is not available in the target encoding, by multicharacther sequence. So, sometimes catdoc can be used as charset converter for plain text files.
Catdoc now doesn't support any multibyte encodings except utf-8. (of course, Word's internal UCS2 representation is supported). Problem is that no one have contributed me code for such support, which can be compiled as MS-DOS realmode program. And I refuse to add any patches which require 32-bit system.
Catdoc is documented in traditional Unix man pages. For MS-DOS users plain-text and postscript versions of man pages are included in the distrbution.
Html formatted versions of man pages are available here: catdoc(1) catppt(1) xls2csv(1).
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