David,

Thanks for your reply.

I had considered using Wv however I am concerned that ceratin users
have reported that it is 4 or 5 times slower than catdoc.

After much stuffing around (mainly with batch files) I have come up
with a solution that may be of intrest to others.

I downloaded the latest version of catdoc from here:

http://ftp.45.free.net/pub/catdoc/catdoc-0.94.2.zip

and wrote a batch file that invokes the dos only version of catdoc
after converting any windows long filenames to short names using %~si

So In my config file I now call a batch file something like this:

FileFilter .doc catdoclog.bat '-s8859-1 -d8859-1 "%p"'

and in the batch file "catdoclog.bat" I invoke catdoc like this:

\lib\swish-e\catdoc.exe %~s3

(~s does the work of expanding the parameter %3 to contain short names only)

I also found that this version of catdoc 0.94 does not require
source/destination charset options and actually reports errors:
"catdoc: no such file or directory" when they are passed.

The other positive of using the intermediate batch file is that it
allows me to log files as they are indexed (which can be helpful for
debugging):

echo %3 >> .\log\document_filter.log

Anyway, hope this of use to someone.

Cheers

Sean

On 3/19/06, David L Norris <dave@webaugur.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 22:20 -0800, Sean wrote:
> > Anyway, in my reading, I have noticed that dave offers win32 binaries
> > of catdoc on the webaugur.com website.
>
> Primarily since it's a modified version of the original and I have to
> provide source code...
>
> > The problem is that none of the versions of catdoc seem to have
> > versioning information in them and I am not sure which is the
> > best/latest/most likely to work correctly.
>
> The catdoc version included with Swish-e is the latest version I've
> ported to Windows.  That version is 0.93 and can be found here along
> with source:
>   http://webaugur.com/wares/files/catdoc-0.93-win32.zip
>
> > Any suggestions as to the best version of catdoc that will support
> > long filenames.
>
> My suggestion would be to try to use something like Wv instead of catdoc
> if you can.  Wv is actively maintained by one of the Abiword developers
> (although the utilities are deprecated) and is available for Windows:
>   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/wv-1.0.2.exe?download
>
> There are other alternatives that use Microsoft office if you have it
> installed on that system.  You should be able to find references to them
> in the list archives:
>   http://swish-e.org/discuss.html
>
> --
>  David L Norris
>   http://webaugur.com/
>   ICQ - 412039
>
>