A needle in a haystack ??

The Unix command strings is quite useful to do that kind of thing:

strings mycrashedwordfile.doc | less

will come up with the text parts of those files in a comfortably paged way.

To speed things up more, you could even do

strings *.doc | less

and if you are sure of the presence of a significant string, you can directly pick the right file, foobar being the string you know is inside:

grep foobar *.doc

The syntax here supposes you cd to the directory where all these doc files live, otherwise you'll have to give the full path.

Good luck.

----

Just saw the edit:

You can also use strings to clean up the text, but BareBones free editor TextWrangler has a very useful "zap gremlins" option.

Still, the way of the get-a-larger-hammer unix.wizard might be something like:

strings borked.doc > interview.txt

If I were you, I'd use a bulletproof text-editor for raw text, then import it for layout. Should silly doc formats be required, I'd convert to that at the last possible moment.

I have never used Unix commands, so this would be the very first time.

My apologies, but can you instruct me in painstaking detail? For instance if I wish to search the file called: "Word Work File D_3958".

It’s sufficient that I find and display the text, it’s not that long and I am perfectly willing to re-type it.

:)

What would happen if you copied and pasted the text into Appleworks? or Openoffice?

Also... I have to 'clean' text before I put it into page in Indesign, I usually put word docs into textedit convert them to plain text then drop them in... have you tried doing the first bit then pasting them back into word and re-saving?

What version of word are you running?

Painstaking Detail:

Pretty simple. Assuming the name above is accurate, first move the file to your desktop.
Next, open Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal and paste the following :
[code]
strings "Desktop/Word Work File D_3958" > Desktop/extracted.txt
[code]

Press return. If absolutely nothing happens (i.e. you just jet another line with the same heading) that's good. Look on your Desktop for a file called "extracted.txt"

If you get something that sounds like an error message, try this instead:

[code]
strings "Desktop/Word Work File D_3958.doc" > Desktop/extracted.txt
[code]

The only difference is the file extension.

Painstaking Detail:

Voldenuit & Acme: Thanks a million for the help!
I have now recovered my notes.

:) :) :)