Google Docs not working

Google Docs is a best-effort path. Clean link-viewable docs work. Gated or heavily-formatted docs often don't. Paste into /try as the cleanest fallback.

Google Docs support is best-effort on purpose.

Docs work when they are reasonably clean text, when the sharing settings permit access, and when the doc is not overloaded with formatting Gist cannot reliably parse.

Clean, link-viewable docs work

Plain-text-ish docs shared as "anyone with the link can view".
Docs small enough to fit inside the reader — essay, memo, report chapter, not a 200-page wiki.
Docs whose content is the point, not the formatting.

Gated or heavily-formatted docs don't

Permission-gated docs. Gist cannot read a doc it cannot access. This includes docs shared only within an org you are not in.
Heavily-formatted docs with tables, embedded drawings, complex outlines, or right-aligned sidebars. These confuse the text extraction.
Docs you just created. Google takes a moment to provision sharing; a brand-new doc may not be reachable for a few seconds.

What to try

Share as "anyone with the link can view" (or confirm it already is).
Reload the doc in Chrome first, then try Gist.
Copy the text and paste it into /try. Raw pasted text is first-class; if the content is what you want Gist'd, this is the cleanest path.
Export to PDF and try the PDF — Google's native PDF export has a clean text layer. See PDF not working.

When to contact support

A clean, link-viewable Google Doc that consistently fails — especially one that worked before and stopped — is a bug. Send it via contact support:

The doc type (text doc, not Slides/Sheets/Drawings).
Whether sharing is set to "anyone with link".
What Gist returned — nothing, a "can't access" message, a partial read.

What is next

What Gist works on — first-class vs. best-effort paths.
/try — the cleanest fallback.