I know that under ms-windows that calibre can convert doc to other file types via Word. Koffice has the same functionality. How would one make calibre talk to Koffice so that one-button doc conversion can be had under linux? Is it just an issue of calling Koffice with options via python or is it a lot more complex?

calibre doesn't convert doc on windows either. But it should be relatively easy to make a custom input format plugin that uses another program to convert doc to html first.

I don't know how easy it would be to do this with KOffice, but using AbiWord (http://abisource.org), I've got a very simple bash script set up to do conversion from .doc to .html (with AbiWord) and from .html to whatever (with calibre's commandline).

E.g. save this as
~/bin/docconvert.sh

#!/bin/bash
filein="$1"
fileout="$2"
abiword --to=html $filein
ebook-convert ${filein%.doc}.html $fileout


Then from the command-line, something like:

docconvert.sh myfile.doc myfile.epub

will convert from .doc to epub.

This could of course be improved a zillion different ways, and can of course, be one of the associated applications for .doc files in nautilus to skip having to open a terminal.

excellent, many thanks. Didn't twig that abiword can do this

For a command line conversion of Word documents prior to docx you can use antiword

http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

If it wasn't clear, AbiWord can do .docx from the commandline too. You may need to tweak the script above for it, though.

thanks for the tips guys. been a long while since I used antiword ;)

I use "antiword -x db" to convert to docbook, then db2epub to convert to epub and then ebook-convert to convert to lrf. You lose all images but most of the format and the chapter structure stays. Sweet and easy!

You lose all images ...

I'm afraid that would be a deal breaker to me.