My old man has a bunch of .dox stuff saved. He has complicated large files saved that are not supported by any of the FOSS conversion tools. I’ve tried Libre office, Abi Word, and every command line tool and converter I can find. These are entire book sized files.

I have a W10 machine with Word. Is extracting the .exe and running it with wine feasible without making an epic mess or massive project of this?

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    You can try Pandoc and see if that works, Google Docs, Office365, finding an abandonware version of Word and running on Wine…lots of options to work with.

    It might be easier to start narrowing down where you need to look if you get the header info from one of these files.

    • j4k3@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 months ago

      I can’t even extract the header. It is coming up as a binary, but it is just mystery encoding shenanigans of m$ criminals failing to build to the iso standard, no doubt, to cause this very issue and attempt to justify infinite payments for a finite tool. The error is in position 22 according to iconv. With $ bat, it reports binary, Only Office won’t even display and fails to pop-up. Both AbiWord and Libre Office detect over a dozen Asian languages and freezes after ~1-2 min, but display. Python3 Docx can’t even load the ‘document = Document(’/tmp/test.docx’)` line.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        2 months ago

        Okay. First off, I downvoted you for obvious reasons.

        Second, if you’re not sure how to extract the header of a file, just Google that. You may be ill prepared and asking for help here.

        • j4k3@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          2 months ago

          You earned the following block. You make foolish assumptions. The header is garbled in Linux entirely there is nothing available to extract with any tools.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            2 months ago

            You don’t understand how file formats work I guess. You can’t just ‘head’ an encoded file and expect a terminal to output what you want. Do some research.