[plug] mass text formatting

[sol]

I've been asked my expert (yeah right! :-)) opinion on formatting a 
relatively large directory of text. It's for an academic style book. ATM 
there are hundreds of files in several directories. Each directory 
represents a chapter, each file a section. It's all in order. And they 
are all in M$ Word 97 format...

The task requires concatenating them without losing much, if any, 
format. A desirable end result would be PDF format. HTML would be good 
too IMO.

My limited experience with this tells me that I could use wv to convert 
everything to either HTML or possibly XML, concatenate them, and then 
run Tidy to remove all the excess header, footers and surplus 
formatting. But this seems somewhat clumsy.

Does anyone have any recommendations for performing a task like this?

Thankyou,
sol