Cross platform open source Doc to RTF converter

Question

I need a doc to rtf converter that will run from the command line, and from within a Perl script (I know I'll need to use system() to run the converter). Any recommendations. Something that can be compiled statically linked so it can run on workstations as standalone binaries would be even more useful.

I want to preserve things like headings, ordered and bulleted lists and tables. Everything else is unimportant.

Answer 1

I've not used it for .DOC to .RTF, but Apache POI is probably a pretty good bet.

Answer 2

If you can go from doc to docx, then you could use docx4j to generate RTF using iText or FOP (I haven't tested the RTF output of either iText or FOP, so I'm not sure how they'll handle tables).

As to going from doc to docx, docx4j has a basic proof of concept of this, using poi's hwpf.