That (continues) to say much more about the inner brokenness of the Word "file format" than attempts to reverse-engineer it. That's a quoted term as the format has little to do with a typical mark-up-version-saved-to-disk, as was standard on such modern formats as ... WordStar and WordPerfect in the late 1980s.
Granted, it doesn't help you much when you've got to interact with someone using some random version of a borken instance of MS Word.
I'm aware that MSFT have moved to an XML-based markup, and that support may have improved. I find the word-processing model (with its assumptions of a static, un-shared paper-based document) fundamentally broken. Most of my communications are in text files, Wiki documents, or on the odd occasion, Google docs or similar which allow simultaneous shared online edits.
It's also curious that nearly 30 years since its release, there's no simple reader for MS Word. Yes, Microsoft released one such. If you hit space (or any other character), say, to scroll through the document as you would a 'less' pager or PDF viewer .... a dialog appeared telling you that this was not an editor. Which you had to dismiss. Every. Fucking. Time.
And somewhere deep within Redmond, someone is still wondering why MS Word DOC format didn't become a universal document interface interchange format.
Granted, it doesn't help you much when you've got to interact with someone using some random version of a borken instance of MS Word.
I'm aware that MSFT have moved to an XML-based markup, and that support may have improved. I find the word-processing model (with its assumptions of a static, un-shared paper-based document) fundamentally broken. Most of my communications are in text files, Wiki documents, or on the odd occasion, Google docs or similar which allow simultaneous shared online edits.
It's also curious that nearly 30 years since its release, there's no simple reader for MS Word. Yes, Microsoft released one such. If you hit space (or any other character), say, to scroll through the document as you would a 'less' pager or PDF viewer .... a dialog appeared telling you that this was not an editor. Which you had to dismiss. Every. Fucking. Time.
And somewhere deep within Redmond, someone is still wondering why MS Word DOC format didn't become a universal document interface interchange format.