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Is there any way to open .doc files in textpad, or to convert all the gibberish generated by word's formatting to regular text or removing it altogether? I can't use openoffice because I'm on a pretty old computer and OO kills its memory.

Is there any way to open .doc files in TextPad

You can open them but as you have already spotted they are full of control characters, Unicode, field codes etc. Just about readable but not pretty.

There are batch utilities that will convert doc files to test but they do seem to cost $$$$.

I take it you don't have access to Word elsewhere to save them as text files? Alternatively, ff you could have them available as PDF files there is an excellent free pdf to text conversion as part of the xPDF tools for Windows.

Hope this helps.

AbiWord http://www.abisource.com/
This free program, available for Windows and non-Windows operating systems, does a good (not perfect) job with .doc files.
It was in PC World's http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/ ... ,16,00.asp list of 101 Fabulous Freebies.