Understanding Microsoft Word's Document Specification for Legal Tech Development
By
piker
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Summary
The article discusses the complexity of Microsoft Word's document specification (Word spec) and how Tritium, a legal tech company, needs to deeply understand and work with this specification to build their word processing technology. The author explains that the Word spec is massive and allows for complex nested structures like tables within paragraphs within tables, which was manageable in C/C++ but presents challenges for modern programming languages like Rust that have different memory management approaches.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledTritium lives in the Word spec because to deliver great legal tech, we think we need to own the word processor.
The Word spec is giant.
It thus supports essentially infinite nesting of paragraphs and tables in other words.
And since Word was written in C/C++ and happy to work with multiple mutable ownership, it's no problem to have these deeply nested structures.
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