Load a document, run the save-time Reconciler over it, and write a repaired copy. Every applied fix is reported with a code, the affected part, and a human-readable message. The result is then run through the write-time package integrity gate, so the output is guaranteed to be a valid OPC package.

Use this when Word’s "The file is corrupt and cannot be opened" dialog appears, when uniword verify reports structural issues, or to clean up documents produced by older or non-conformant tools.

1. Usage 

# Repair and report a summary
uniword repair broken.docx fixed.docx

# Show every applied fix
uniword repair broken.docx fixed.docx --verbose

Exit code is 0 on success, 1 if the Reconciler cannot fix every issue (reported with their codes).

2. What the Reconciler fixes

The Reconciler enforces cross-part invariants before serialization. The repairs are deterministic and applied every time you save — repair simply makes them visible.

Area Repair

Relationships

Strips dangling r:id / r:embed / r:link references, normalizes duplicate rIds, allocates fresh ids via Docx::IdAllocator

Required parts

Rebuilds missing footnotes.xml, endnotes.xml, comments.xml, settings defaults

Footnote/endnote sync

Bidirectional: creates footnotePr when footnotes exist, creates footnotes.xml when footnotePr is set; same for endnotes

Note separators

Injects missing separator (id=-1) and continuation (id=0) footnote/endnote entries

Bookmark pairing

Strips unpaired bookmarkStart / bookmarkEnd references

Comments

Anchors commentRangeStart/commentRangeEnd/commentReference to the right paragraph; registers CommentReference style

Content types

Adds missing overrides for parts the document actually carries

Settings

Fills defaults Word expects (compat, mathPr, rsid, etc.)

3. Programmatic usage

The Reconciler runs automatically on every doc.save. To see what was applied, capture the repair log:

doc = Uniword::DocumentFactory.from_file("broken.docx")
doc.save("fixed.docx")   # Reconciler runs here

For one-shot repair reporting, the CLI is the simplest path.

4. Relationship to other commands