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?

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldOP
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    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
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      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
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        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
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          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.