Comments on: How to convert Word Document files into plain-text files

By: Warren

Warren — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 13:34:37 +0000

You are talking ‘regex’ or ‘regular expressions’. These characters pertaining to layout and formatting of texts. Do a search of these terms and you will find your answer. It can be done in Microsoft Word but it takes a bit of getting used to.

By: Canis

Canis — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:55:21 +0000

I would like to have some pseudo formatting in the textfile like empty lines between paragraphs, underlines as a second line with dashes and a character in front of lines of a list. Does anybody know a toll that does this? Example:

This is an underlined Header
————————————-

See this list:

* entry 1
* entry 2
* entry 3

By: Mary Strong-Spaid

Mary Strong-Spaid — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 02:15:15 +0000

I worked as a proposal desktop publisher for years, through all the different versions of Word. Lots of version compatibility problems! It seems that, as soon as I learn one version and all the tricks about how to handle it, here comes another updated Word. Sigh.

By: Warren

Warren — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:40:10 +0000

You can try something like SpiceLogic. It is the only one I have tried and worked but that was a while back. Document format has also changed so it may not have kept pace. Otherwise do a "doc-to-txt" search on your favourite search engine to find the latest. Good luck.

By: bennet ton

bennet ton — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:57:20 +0000

wow!

just kidding.

Now, for real, how do you convert 50 word documents into .txt files at once?

By: Mariusu

Mariusu — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:01:50 +0000

Method 1 and method 2 results are not the same. Only method 1 gives true plain text (try to save table with method 2 to see the difference).

By: Warren M Tang

Warren M Tang — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 08:19:26 +0000

David,
Thanks for this.

When I wrote this I had been talking about English corpus linguistics. Much of the problems people had had to do with unwanted Japanese unicode encoded punctuation (apostrophes were a big problem), which is why I showed this method. So I guess I need to write another post to clarify this point.

By: David Heizer

David Heizer — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 05:47:02 +0000

To preserve international characters (with accents, etc.), save as Unicode, not as ASCII (“Text”). ASCII is the original coding dating back to the dawn of the computer age; it uses one byte per character (7 of the 8 bits), for a maximum alphabet of 128 possible characters. (Mac and Windows each started using the other 128 for differing sets of special characters, which is why “curly quotes” on one machine will come up as odd characters on the other.)

Unicode uses two bytes per character, allowing for 65,000 characters in a typeface, ample for all the alphabetic languages in the world. (That’s a lot of characters for a typeface designer!)

By: Zarfishan Zahid

Zarfishan Zahid — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:27:48 +0000

There is also an online Word converter available using you can create and convert your document to any other format.

By: Warren M Tang

Warren M Tang — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:53:22 +0000

It should be there (look for ‘.txt’). Otherwise use the other method.