antiword: You can’t deny it works

Antiword. I know the bulk of your criticism will be that, technically, this software is easily a decade out of date.

The home page declares antiword capable of converting a long range of Microsoft Word formats — up to and including Word 2003 — to plain text or postscript.

Which nowadays isn’t very useful. I will acknowledge your criticism if you will acknowledge that antiword, despite its age, still does its job.

It’s one thing for a program to fall out of its span of usability, break into pieces with dependency updates, and lay panting on the roadside like a crash victim (where did this prose come from?).

But antiword is aging gracefully. Yes, its not capable of decoding docx. And I know it stutters at times with converted doc files in some situations — I’ve seen it happen, even in the past few years.

But it still does what it claims, works against modern distros, is at home in most current repos, even if it hasn’t been updated in a decade.

And as someone accustomed to working with hardware well outside the curve of modern technology, I can tell you that a 10-year-old document converter with no updates that still works is better than a 10-month-old fancy-pants composite manager under fervent development that doesn’t.

So take it for what it’s worth.