Re: [Groff] conversion to DOC format

[Larry Kollar]

> I am pleased to say that I managed to graduate, having written and
> successfully defended my thesis which I wrote using groff and friends.

Hooray! Let me be the first to say: "Hey Doc, I got this itch..." :-D

> I am very pleased with groff, and try to promote it as a viable
> alternative to other text or word processing programs.  Unfortunately,
> it doesn't quite 'fit the bill' for my next adventure - finding suitable
> employment.
>
> Many firms or government agencies require cover letters and resumes
> in Microsoft Word (i.e. .DOC) format. ...

I've begin using groff to document a new project at work. Once in a
while, being the only writer is an advantage.

Anyway, since you're using -ms, you can output to HTML, tidy it up a bit,
and read that into Weird (or better yet, OpenOffice -- I just installed
1.1.2 on my iBook and it does a better job with flaky .doc files than
Weird.X does). Skip the RTF, skip the converters, just use -Thtml.

Both Word and OpenOffice easily read HTML files I created from grohtml
with some simple pre- and post-processing (I've verified this with both
programs). For an example, grab a copy of my "Effective Manpages"
source from:
        http://home.alltel.net/kollar/groff/effman.tar.gz
The tarball contains the Makefile & all the scripts I used to create and
process the HTML, it might give you some ideas.

Chances are, all these people are looking for is something they can read
into Weird. This is a dirty trick I learned from the AbiWord folks a while
back, but it works: create an HTML file, rename it to whatever.doc, and
send that. They'll double-click it and Word will open it right up. So you 
can even skip the "open it in Word and save as .doc" step if you like. :-)

Hope that helps, and good luck with the job search!

     Larry