How to Convert Word DOC to Unicode Text

You have a folder of Word documents in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, or any other non-Latin script and need the raw text without formatting. A simple Save As → Plain Text drops special characters or replaces them with question marks because the default ANSI encoding cannot store them. Total Doc Converter exports DOC and DOCX files to Unicode plain text (UTF-8 or UTF-16) in batch — every character is preserved, every file is processed automatically.

Word DOC vs Unicode Text: What Is the Difference?

Why Unicode Matters for Text Export

• ANSI loses characters — the default "Plain Text" save in Word uses ANSI encoding (Windows-1252 or similar). Any character outside that code page — Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, accented letters from other code pages — is replaced with "?" or dropped entirely.
• UTF-8 is universal — a single UTF-8 file stores English, Japanese, and Arabic text simultaneously. No code-page conflicts, no garbled characters.
• Database and API compatibility — databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) and REST APIs expect UTF-8 input. Feeding them ANSI text causes encoding errors and corrupted records.
• NLP and text mining — machine-learning pipelines and search engines work on plain text. Stripping Word formatting while keeping Unicode characters intact is a standard preprocessing step.
• Smaller file size — a plain-text file is 10–50× smaller than the same content in DOCX format. Storage and transfer costs drop accordingly.

How to Convert Word to Unicode Text — Step by Step

Command-Line Conversion

Total Doc Converter includes a command-line interface for automated processing:

DocConverter.exe "C:\Docs\*.doc" "C:\Output\" -cTXT -eUTF8

Parameters: source path (wildcards supported), output directory, -cTXT sets the target format to plain text, -eUTF8 selects UTF-8 encoding. Replace with -eUTF16 for UTF-16 output. Save this in a .bat file and schedule it with Windows Task Scheduler for nightly batch conversion of incoming documents.

Encoding Options Compared

Online Converters vs Total Doc Converter

Why Choose Total Doc Converter?

True Unicode output

Total Doc Converter writes proper UTF-8 or UTF-16 with a correct BOM (Byte Order Mark). Every character from the source Word file — whether it is Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, or a mix of all — appears correctly in the output TXT. No replacement characters, no question marks, no garbled text.

Batch conversion without limits

Select 10 files or 10,000. Total Doc Converter processes the entire batch with the same settings. No need to open each file individually. Subfolders are included automatically when enabled.

More than just TXT

The same tool converts DOC and DOCX to PDF, HTML, XLS, JPEG, TIFF, and RTF. One application covers all document-conversion needs. Switch the target format with a single click.

Command-line for automation

Schedule conversions with a .bat script and Windows Task Scheduler. A shared folder receives new Word files overnight; by morning, UTF-8 text versions are ready for the database import pipeline.

Reads old and new Word formats

Total Doc Converter opens DOC (Word 97–2003), DOCX (Word 2007+), RTF, ODT (OpenDocument), WPD (WordPerfect), and plain TXT. Legacy archives with mixed formats are converted in one run.

When Do You Need Word-to-Unicode Conversion?

• Multilingual document processing — a translation agency receives Word files in 30+ languages. Converting to UTF-8 text standardizes the input for translation-memory tools that require plain-text segments.
• Database imports — a logistics company stores shipment descriptions in Word templates. Exporting to UTF-8 text feeds the data into a PostgreSQL database without encoding errors, even for addresses in Chinese, Arabic, or Cyrillic.
• Search indexing — a law firm indexes thousands of contracts. Plain-text files are faster to index than DOC/DOCX, and UTF-8 ensures that party names in any script are searchable.
• NLP and text mining — a research team extracts text from survey responses stored as Word files. UTF-8 plain text is the input format for tokenizers, sentiment analysis, and topic-modeling pipelines.
• Archival and compliance — regulations require long-term storage of document content. Plain text with Unicode encoding is a format-independent standard that does not rely on Microsoft Word being available 20 years from now.

Download the free 30-day trial — no email or credit card required. A personal license costs $49.90 and includes one year of free upgrades. Works on Windows 7/8/10/11.

Download Free Trial Buy License — $49.90

Total Doc Converter Customer Reviews 2026

Rate ItRated 4.7/5 based on customer reviews