It could be done this way, but frankly, Abiword's Word importer isn't very good. OpenOffice's, while not perfect, is much better. Unfortunately, unlike Abiword,

It could be done this way, but frankly, Abiword's Word importer isn't very good. OpenOffice's, while not perfect, is much better. Unfortunately, unlike Abiword, OOo doesn't come with a nice command-line utility for doing those conversions. OOo has a VBA-esque language that allows you to automate tasks like that, but it's a lot more suitable for more "interactive" purposes than as part of another app's backend. Another thing to note is that some of Scribd's backend is written in C#. Maybe if your app is Windows based, there are Office API calls that let you do stuff like this. Just a guess, though.