I know this question is a couple of months old and that it has probably been solved, so I won't go into details unless asked for details.

There is a utility provided by Microsoft that converts Word documents to XML.

There is a book that describes conversion of Word documents to XHTML and then to XML.

I catdoc to use a search engine for use in word and rtf files to parse text. The tables and documents, just does not render the structure of text. But you see, you do it with a lot of utils. I use it catdoc Hebrew text very well renders, and I do not have the structure of the document.

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