Grutatxt is a plain text to HTML (and other formats) converter. It succesfully converts subtle text markup to lists, bold, italics, tables and headings to their corresponding HTML tags or troff commands without having to write unreadable source text files. Grutatxt is a perl module and a command line utility.
catdoc is program which reads one or more Microsoft word files and outputs text, contained insinde them to standard output. Therefore it does same work for .doc files, as unix cat command for plain ASCII files.