I once had a similar problem where I needed to save a document in Word format. I ran OpenOffice from perl.

system qw{/path/to/soffice -invisible},
  qq{"macro:///Standard.Converters.SaveAsDoc($(in),$(out))"};
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REM  *****  BASIC  *****

Sub SaveAsDoc( inFile, outFile )
    inURL = ConvertToURL( inFile )
    oDoc = StarDesktop.loadComponentFromURL( inURL, "_blank", 0, (_
        Array(MakePropertyValue( "Hidden", True ),))


    outURL = ConvertToURL( outFile )
   
    oDoc.storeToURL( outURL, Array(_
        MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "MS Word 97" ),)
    oDoc.close( True )

End Sub

Function MakePropertyValue( Optional cName As String, Optional uValue 
+) As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
    Dim oPropertyValue As New com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
    If Not IsMissing( cName ) Then
        oPropertyValue.Name = cName
    EndIf
    If Not IsMissing( uValue ) Then
        oPropertyValue.Value = uValue
    EndIf
    MakePropertyValue() = oPropertyValue
End Function
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If you just need the content, without preserving style and layout, you can use something like:

 open my $f_txt, "-|", "antiword $document" or die "...";
 while (<$f_txt>) {
     # read line by line
     }
 close $f_txt;
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And I know this *really* isn't the answer you're looking for, but the source of open office might be modular enough so that you could have perl invoke it to do the job.