----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sean Middleditch" <elanthis / awesomeplay.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 12:36 PM
Subject: Win32 Scripting


>  As someone who's barely touched a Windows system in 4 years, I'm in
> some need of help designed a "simple" script: we have some 100+
> documents saved in MS Word format.  We need them converted to RTF format
> (the Township I work for has a new policy, thanks to my boss and I,
> mandating all publicly available documents must be in portable and,
> preferably, open standard formats).

Sorry I can't comment on the technique you want... but I
thought I'd comment on one thing just in case it was an
issue.

My understanding is probably flawed, but I thought that
RTF (though touted as an open standard) was really a
Microsoftism that was intimately tied to the "latest"
implementation of MS Word.

Microsoft (perhaps even worse than IBM) thinks that
everything they do is a standard.

Of course, every standard originates somewhere. PDF comes
from Adobe, though it may arguably be more open.

There's always XHTML; what could be more open than that?
But it may not be what you need.

Now pardon me while I go back to my paperwork for
patenting the ASCII character set.

Hal