Something like
abiword --input-type word --output-type text --output-file test.txt test.doc
that would read the Word document test.doc and produce the text
document test.txt.
This would be really useful for many situations (and could in fact get
a whole lot of new people to use abiword : the ones who do not care to
do text processing a la Word under Unix, but who do need to read Word
files they receive!).
Jacques