This is the home of the wv library, the wv library is the new name of the project previously known as mswordview. Seeing as that name is far too close to microsoft's own product named wordview I have renamed this library to wv.

wv is a library which allows access to microsoft word files. It can load and parse the word 2000,97,95 and 6 file formats. These are the file formats known internally as word 9,8,7 and 6. wv compiles and works under most operating systems, particularly Linux, Solaris, AIX and OSF1. It is (to my knowledge) very portable and I have reports that it can be compiled under windows using cygwin32, and that it can compile under AmigaOS VMS and OS/2 with varying levels of success.

wv allows other programs access to word documents for the purpose of converting them to other formats, it is currently being used by Abiword as its word importer. I have written a sample application that uses the library named wvHtml. wvHtml converts word documents to html 4.0 for viewing in a webbrowser, wvHtml makes some use of stylesheet's to give a close conversion to the original layout, while retaining a logical html structure. There are always some word capabilities which cannot be converted cleanly, for example whitespace, so keep this in mind when reviewing the html output from a word document, I'm particularly interested in features which microsoft word's own html converter can handle better than wvHtml.

The library is available under the GPL license, and you can download it here, I have an online conversion gateway setup so that you can test it without downloading it, you can also submit word documents that crash the library, or that you feel are converted incorrectly here also.

The active mailing list for wv development and the hangout for its developers is now the abiword list, and the latest bleeding edge stuff is in abi's cvs. Prospective developers should join that list, and follow their cvs instructions, the wv source is in the wv package. i.e. cvs checkout wv

btw Bitwrench drew me the base components of that snazzy logo, I assembled them into the final one, so basically the good bits are theirs, and the bad bits are my own mistake.