I have some HTML files that I need to distribute in MS Word doc format (don\'t ask!). I can manually open each in OpenOffice and then save as a doc file. But I have quite a few
Havn't tested but there is pyuno package to access OpenOffice API and following program show some ways to do like that.
ooextract.py
A command line tool, that extracts the text, html or pdf content from a StarWriter document and writes it to a different file or (optionally) prints it to stdout (grep your office documents).
Abiword can convert files from the command line.
I haven't personally tried it to convert HTML to DOC, but since it supports both those formats, it seems like it's worth a try.
Also, would RTF be good enough? There are lots of converters for HTML->RTF.