any shortcuts to doc to ascii?

[Bob Hall]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 10:53:39PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> On Thursday 27 May 2010 05:18:07 pm Bob Hall wrote:
> > On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 04:36:08PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> > > 	ps: antiword same as catdoc.  back to my per substitutions.
> > > 	that works, along with vi's Builtin subs.
> > 
> > Have you considered using whatever replaces the most special characters,
> > and fixing the few characters that remain with sed?
> 
> exactly!!!

Another possibility, if you haven't considered it, is using sed to
convert everything. If you know all the characters that need to be
swapped out, you can write a sed script that will do it for you in one
pass. If you don't know sed, creating the script may be a PITA, but
you'll only have to do it once, and then you can reuse the script
whenever needed.

As I recall, the hard part is figuring out how to represent the special
characters in sed. It's been a few years since I used sed on doc files,
but I recall that the character codes that displayed on my screen were
not the codes that I needed to use in sed scripts.