i kept needing to feed word files to llms and coding agents, and reading old .doc files from ruby always meant shelling out to libreoffice or antiword. so i wrote readword, its plain ruby, reads both .doc and .docx and gives you markdown with the headings, numbered lists, tables and links kept. compared it with antiword, the docx gem and anydoc on 650 files, numbers are in the readme. if you have a word file it gets wrong id love to see it