Allan, A while back, I looked into this (parsing Word files with MacPerl). At that time, it seemed the best way to do this on a Mac would be to have your Perl script run an AppleScript to make Word save the file as html (because a text file won't include the formats you're interested in).
The MacPerl/AppleScript combo seemed easy & powerful. Unfortunately, I have never learned much AppleScript, so I didn't get far. Regards, Tim Grant DBA, Knowledge Express >>../allan >> does someone know if it's at all >>possible to actually read a microsoft word file and convert >>it to some reasonable text format?