Right now I'm generating HTML with a Perlscript, and then manually converting to DOC in OpenOffice. Actually I have to copy, create new "Text document", paste, save, as it treats HTML and DOC as separate file types, but that's quite unessential. That's very inconvenient.
Is there any automated way I can convert HTML to decent DOC, or some other nice format like HTML I can generate textually and convert to DOC in automated way?
(I'm on OSX)
I can't help you get to .doc, but have you seen the Open XML Format SDK from Microsoft? This will allow you to generate Office 2007 format documents (.docx, .xlsx etc) from .NET code.
Theoretically you may have some luck with this under Mono on OS X, as it doesn't require an installation of Office 2007 (for Windows) to function.
Not sure if this is what you want, but you can fairly easily generate WordML documents with code. WordML is the Word 2003 XML file format. It's NOT the same thing at the Office 2007 Open XML formats. WordML is just one file that's not too hard to create if your just doing fairly basic formatting. You could generate it directly rather than creating the HTML first. You can name the files with a .DOC extension and Word 2003 and later will open them just fine. You can resave them as real .DOC file if you want.
Here's the on-line WordML reference. I can send you some sample code if you'd like. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa212812%28office.11%29.aspx
If you really want to create a general file format that could be converted into other formats, creating XML-FO file might be the way to go. There are a number of products out there that can take XML-FO and transform it into other files, such as Word and PDF.