word-documents

Word Documents

Purpose

Produce and manipulate .docx files programmatically, with real styles and structure rather than a wall of manually formatted paragraphs.

When to Use

• Generating a report, memo, letter, or contract as a Word document.
• Extracting text, tables, or comments from an existing .docx.
• Performing find-and-replace across a document while preserving formatting.
• Filling a template with data.
• Working with tracked changes or comments.

Capabilities

• Document generation with headings, tables, images, headers, and footers.
• Style application and modification.
• Content extraction, including tables and embedded objects.
• Find-and-replace preserving runs and formatting.
• Template filling.
• Tracked changes and comments.

Inputs

• The content and its structure.
• A template or style reference, if the output must match a house style.
• The source document, when reading or editing.

Outputs

• A valid .docx with a proper style hierarchy.
• Extracted content in a structured form.
• An edited document that preserves the formatting it should preserve.

Workflow

1. Use styles, never direct formatting — A heading is Heading 1, not 18pt bold. Styles produce a navigable document, a working table of contents, and a document that can be restyled in one operation.
2. Start from a template when the house style matters — Load the organization's .dotx or a reference .docx and write into its styles rather than recreating them.
3. Structure before content — Headings, then the body. The outline is what makes a long document usable.
4. Preserve formatting when editing — A naive find-and-replace on the XML destroys runs. Replace within runs, and handle text split across runs.
5. Verify the output — Open it. A .docx that a library writes without error can still be malformed in ways Word will complain about.

Best Practices

• Direct formatting (bold, a font size, a colour applied by hand) makes a document unmaintainable. Every visual property should come from a style.
• Text in Word is stored in runs, and a single sentence is frequently split across several. A replace that only handles single-run text will silently miss matches where formatting changes mid-word.
• Tables need a table style, or they render with no borders and are unreadable when printed.
• Images need explicit dimensions. Without them, Word inserts at native resolution, which is usually enormous.
• A table of contents field must be marked for update, and Word will prompt the user on open. This is expected behavior, not a bug.
• For a document that will be edited by humans, keep the structure simple. Deeply nested tables and text boxes are fragile.