In order to do the deed, you would have to find out from MSFT the EXACT
details of Word's internal format. I would not count on MSFT supplying such
an EXACT description unless under license.

If you are running a VB 6 program, then I expect your target is a Windows
platform. As a practical matter, I would expect that most folkes having
Windoze also have Office or Word. So the best bet is to do your deed via
creating a Word object.

Hi Nate,

Part of what you're asking depends on the need
for detail of content.

You can use MS Windows Wordpad to open a Word .doc
file and save it as RTF, but Wordpad does not support
all of Word's features.  You may want to look at
3rd party converters http://acii.com that do this
type of conversion and some can be manipulated via
code, for example, but the page information isn't
fully stored in Word.  Word reads the printer driver
in effect when the file is opened and paginates
the document for that driver when it's opened.

Saving to plain text in any form will likely cost
a number of Word features including table layouts,
graphics, non 'text' fonts, styles, etc.

There may also be information on http://msdn.microsoft.com

==========
Hello,

I need to be able to pull in some relatively simple Word files
(preferably of any vintage, but I'd probably settle for more recent
versions) for display in my Visual Basic 6 application.  Ideally, I'd
be able to display them more or less as they were displayed in Word --
with tab stops in the same places, basic text markup (font face and
size, bold, italics) preserved -- within my application.  Internally, I
need to parse a plaintext version of the file.  Ideally, I'd also be
able to determine the page # that a particular bit of text was on, in
the original word document.  Oh, and I *cannot* guarantee that the
client on which this program will be run will have a copy of Word.

So what I'm thinking I need:
1. A way to convert from Word to RTF.
2. A way to display RTF.
3. A way to convert from Word (or RTF) to plaintext.
4. A way to determine in an RTF file or Word file where the page breaks
lie (this could be a feature of the magic converter of #1 or #3 -- I
could just do the conversion one page at a time, if the converter knew
about pagination).  By page breaks, I don't mean only the forced ones
-- I want to be able to grab a particular page as Word would print it.

... all from within VB6 without Microsoft Office present.

Am I dreaming to be able to do all that without scads of effort?  I'd
appreciate any pointers to sample code, open source libraries,
commercially licensable libraries.

Thanks!
Nate Roberts>>