pdf - Parsing / Converting legacy Word documents? (msword2 / 5)

Question

We got some really old .doc documents. Normally we use tika (our application normally does a text extract and then a PDF/A convert) but apparently msword2 (and msword5) are not supported currently. The only alternative I found was Libreoffice commandline. Is there anything else?

Searching for this is quite hard since everyone else seems to be looking for "old" as in 1995< and not <1991

Answer 1

We have looked into the issue a bit more and it seems that the only answer is that we need to use some version of the libwps library (which is the same LibreOffice uses).

We will look into the pros and cons of using Libreoffice commandline or the library itself and will probably just create a microservice for our application to use.