LibreOffice keeps a paragraph's space above and below in one item, so a
style that declares only one of them does not inherit the other from its
parent chain — the missing half falls back to the default paragraph
style. Probed against soffice with the OPG fixture's own styles, where
it is the difference between a heading sitting flush and 4mm too low.
LibreOffice adds the upper block's space-below to the lower one's
space-above, and drops the space-above where a page break put the block
at a page top — but for a Word document it takes only the larger of the
two (all probed against soffice). CSS margins can only collapse, so
space-before rides --space-before and editor.css renders it as padding
('add') or margin ('max'); the model is read from settings.xml, assumed
for DOCX, and written back on ODF export.
A positioned frame in a header is out of flow — the title-page background or
watermark. It keeps its wrap and its offset from the page corner, and the
layer paints it per page under the body instead of flowing it inline, where
it reserved a page-tall line of body space.
The page surface moves from .tiptap to .paper so the image has a layer
between the sheet and the text; ODF export writes it back page-anchored.
The TOC node regenerated over every heading level and minted a title of its
own. A file asking for level 1 only (text:outline-level, Word's TOC \o range)
got a 43-entry index instead of 12 — a full page where LibreOffice needs a
quarter, plus a second "Table of Contents" under the file's own heading.
maxLevel and an empty title now round-trip through both formats.
An ODF master page whose style:next-style-name names another master applies
to a single page. Read as the section's running header, this file's full-page
title background repeated on every page and its height pushed each block onto
its own — 276 pages instead of 16.
Its zones now become the first-page variants, the successor's the running
ones, and a positioned frame in a zone is dropped as in DOCX.
Bookmarks are a mark, not a point: both formats store a range, and only a
range lets a REF recompute its text. A cross-reference caches its display
like a Word field and resolves live on each pagination settle — the
bookmark's text, or the page it renders on — keeping the cached value when
the target is gone. Ctrl+click jumps to it, internal #name links too.
ODF splices its sentinels into the run text so cells and custom paragraphs
need no separate emitter; DOCX needs no post-pass at all.
The DOCX importer read w:tblBorders off the table but never off its table
style, so a table whose style declares none (Word's Normal Table, and the
thesis' Formel-tab around every formula) fell back to the editor's 0.5pt
black default. Resolved per side along the w:basedOn chain, and an
undeclared side is not drawn — LibreOffice writes fo:border="none" for
exactly those tables when it re-saves the file. The ODF importer already
treated an undeclared side that way.
A top-and-bottom frame carrying positionH align / style:horizontal-pos
keeps it only where a nearby frame is set against the other end
(pairAlignedFrames, both importers); such a pair floats to its own side
instead of filling the band, so the two sit side by side as they do in
LibreOffice. A pair slightly wider than the column is scaled to it —
Word lets the two overlap, two floats cannot.
An EMF is replayed into SVG (import/emf.ts): window/viewport plus world
transform, a DC stack, pens/brushes/fonts, the poly and path records,
EXTTEXTOUT and embedded DIBs. It rides the lazy pre-pass both importers
already use for TIFF, so a document without one pays nothing.
a fixture fixture's seven MATLAB plots arrive as pictures now.
<chart:chart> in the object's sub-document, read through the same picture as
the DOCX leg: series values by cell range out of its own local-table, colours
from the series style, bounds from the axis style.
word/charts/chartN.xml → an SVG picture of the frame's size: series from the
producer's numCache, theme accent colours, titles, gridlines and the axis
bounds the file fixes. Bar, line, area, scatter and pie; the rest keep the box.
Only a body block carries a styleName, so measuring the others against their
own style suppressed everything the style gave them and nothing re-applied it.
Word's caption style lost its italic and colour in every text box that way.
Word wraps every citation in a w:sdt; the inline walk ignored the wrapper, so
its runs never reached the paragraph. a fixture fixture lost every [7]-style
reference with them, and now matches LibreOffice's page count.
Word's w:lvlJc / ODF's fo:text-align on the level: set right, the label grows
into the margin instead of over the text it labels. That is what the built-in
Roman numberings use, and a fixture's numerals collided without it.
Both anchor offsets now render: the x moves the rotor inside the full-width
float, the y the float's top. Chromium puts every line after such a float
below it, so a frame set below the paragraph top is sunk behind the text at
import and the node view measures what those lines already cover.
A formula node stores only its LaTeX source; the MathML on screen, the ODF
formula object and Word's OMML are derived from it, and both importers parse
foreign markup back into that source, so an imported formula stays editable.
Word documents were losing their formulas outright: m:oMath sits beside the w:r
runs in its own namespace, past convertInline's `namespaceURI !== W` guard.
Only the top level's own w:ind w:left (ODF: the label-alignment margin)
was read; every level below it was forced to the editor's 1.27cm step.
Both formats store a level's indent absolutely while the editor nests one
step per level, so import now subtracts the level above and the ODF
export adds the running sum back per level (DOCX already accumulated).
Measured: a 0.5cm/-0.6cm pair puts LibreOffice's two levels at 1.77cm and
2.44cm, and the editor draws them at 1.769 and 2.44. Parity corpus
unchanged.
w:tcMar and an ODF cell style's own fo:padding were both dropped: the
table's value (in ODF the first cell's) stood for every cell.
cellPadding is now an attr on tableCell/tableHeader too, measured against
the table's rather than the editor default, so only a real disagreement
carries one. --cell-pad inherits, so the cell's own declaration wins for
its own td and the CSS is unchanged.
Checked against LibreOffice: a 1.2cm cell in a 0.3cm table puts its text
at 332.2pt where the grid column starts at 297.6.
LibreOffice restarts the tab grid on the continuation line; Chromium
hangs the leftover tabs and starts the next line at the margin, 160mm
away in the repro. The run is walked from the pen before it — the one
thing the fix can't move, so the answer holds whether or not the break
is already in place — and a break widget goes where the line runs out.
Measuring this turned up why the two disagreed in the first place: a
file that declares no tab interval falls back to ODF's own 2cm, not to
LibreOffice's UI default of 1.25, so leaving ours implied on export
rendered every tab elsewhere. Both exports declare it now, and both
imports fall back to their format's value rather than to ours.
Only runs of two or more are walked: reading a block's geometry forces
a reflow, and doing it per tab across 48 pages slowed pagination enough
that the parity harness compared a layout still settling.
The left⇥centre⇥right layout every letterhead uses rides on them, and a
zone had none: Word keeps them on the Header style, ODF on the zone
paragraph's, and neither was read or written.
An inactive zone is static generateHTML output no plugin reaches, so it
is measured straight on the DOM. Two bugs surfaced doing it: a segment
its own advance had pushed onto the next line measured as wrapped, and
the alignment then had no way back — it takes the sum of the segment's
client rects now. And the scale came from offsetHeight, which rounds
half a percent away on a zone one line tall.
The default tab interval was fixed at 1.25cm, so a file's own
w:defaultTabStop / style:tab-stop-distance was ignored and the DOCX
export wrote 1.25 back over Word's 1.27. It is a document setting now.
A stop can also carry the character it repeats across its gap. odf-kit
has no leader option and mints one automatic style per option set, so
the leader rides style:type behind a sentinel — matching on position
and alignment alone gave every stop at 6cm the same leader, which
LibreOffice drew back plain as day.
A document had one set for all of it, taken from whichever section
declared one last — so a fixture lost its letterhead entirely
and page 1 got the empty header its final section asked for.
A body block now carries `sectionBreak`, ordinal rather than indexed so
editing cannot desync it. Import resolves Word's "Link to Previous" per
reference type; export writes a set per sectPr, and on the ODF side each
section past the first gets its own master page, which the block switches
to. The layer picks a page's set from where pageBreaks reports the
sections starting, and each section's zone reaches ride
`--pb-section-reach` so a later section's letterhead makes room for
itself: page 10 of a fixture was 24.9mm out, now 1.1mm.
Editing still reaches section 1 only; the rest render read-only.
The root file is read at every session start and had grown to 87 KB, so every
session paid for knowledge it did not use. Move the per-directory detail into
nested CLAUDE.md files, which load when a file in that directory is touched,
and the five deep-dive topics into docs/. The root keeps the commands, the hard
rules and an index of where the rest lives.
Content moved verbatim — the probed Word/LibreOffice behaviour, sentinel order
and shared constants are what the code cannot say. CI fails the root over 120
lines, since a prose budget alone is what let it grow.
The cell padding was a constant in three places that disagreed with each
other, so a narrow column lost 0.38cm it did not have: a bibliography
marker column of 0.71cm wrapped "[2] " onto three lines and every entry
grew with it, costing a fixture a whole page.
The table now carries its own margins (w:tblCellMar, direct or from the
table style; fo:padding on the ODF cell style) and both exports write
them back. A side within a twentieth of a millimetre of the default is
the default, or Word's 108 twips would tag every table.
keepLines (w:keepLines, fo:keep-together) is keepNext's sibling and was the
one of the pair nobody read: a block that declares it now paginates whole,
unless it is taller than a page, where Word splits it too.
The vertical frame offset is data only from here on. A line box avoids a
float's whole margin box, so applying it made dead space where Word flows
text — measured: a fixture's figure page went from 131mm off to 187mm.
Text boxes and shapes had no offsets at all, and for images the wrap side
overrode the x: a file that names the side its text flows on lost the
coordinate, our own export included. Side and place are read separately now,
and one helper turns both into the float's margins for every frame kind.
Letter case, the underline's shape and colour, a double strikethrough and a
freely raised run all had no home in the model, so every one of them was
dropped on import. They ride the marks now, render in CSS, and round-trip.
odf-kit's run formatting has a field for none of them, so a sentinel folds
them into the run's own automatic style — the route the character styles
already take, and it reaches every path odf-kit serializes.
Word's positionV and ODF's svg:y say how far below its paragraph a frame
sits; ignoring it put every figure at the anchor itself. It is the float's
top margin, so lines that fit above the frame still flow there, as in Word.
Word's highlighter is w:highlight, a palette name; only w:shd's hex fill was
read, so 121 yellow runs of a fixture imported unmarked. 'none' maps to the
same 'auto' sentinel an empty w:shd gives, so it still cancels a style's pen.
A drawing the editor cannot render was dropped outright, and everything below
it moved up: a thesis with five charts and four EMF figures lost 102cm of
layout, five whole pages of it. They now come in as a labelled box of the
drawing's own size, so the pages hold what they hold in Word.
A German document's "Inhalt" came back as "Table of Contents" — the node
carried no title of its own, so the generated one always won. Now the
imported heading rides on the node and goes back out with it.
A letterhead header is usually a couple of empty lines, the logo, then one
more — the empty leading ones were dropped on import, and the body's content
area counted every line as one text line, logo included. Page 1 of a contract
form started 19mm too high.
A heading whose successor no longer fits below it was left stranded at the
page foot; Word and LibreOffice move it down with them, which is why their
heading styles all carry w:keepNext / fo:keep-with-next. Headings do it by
default here, so the attr only marks the other blocks that ask for it.
One level deep: a run of kept-together blocks would need the pagination pass
to reconsider leaves it has already placed.
Word's Title style tightens by -0.5pt, so a title came out ~3mm wide of
LibreOffice's. letterSpacingPt joins TextProps and rides both formats
(w:spacing, fo:letter-spacing).
Line spacing needed the same care: it is proportional to the font's natural
line height, so the factor and that height are now separate CSS variables and
editor.css multiplies them in one place. Before, whichever of the two was
declared nearer simply overwrote the other — a block carrying its own font
silently dropped the style's spacing.
The block's CSS strut is the floor under every line, so a paragraph whose runs
are smaller or of another family than the style rendered too tall — 03-fonts
drifted 4mm over a page. The mark's family now rides the block like its size
already did (Word's w:pPr/w:rPr/w:rFonts, ODF the paragraph's own text
properties), and supplies the natural line height single spacing means.
A mark that declares nothing but whose runs all agree takes their font: that
is the paragraph's font, and it is what a word processor struts with.
Word anchors a wrapped frame at an offset; the model only knew a side, so a
frame the file puts 91mm in snapped to the margin and the text beside it came
out 20mm too narrow. wrapOffset carries that x (cm from the column's left
edge, Word's posOffset / ODF svg:x) and the float's outer margin renders it —
against the column vars, so an indented anchor paragraph cannot skew it.
Picking a wrap side in the toolbar clears the offset: that gesture means
"put it there".
An inline atom wider than the column is pushed onto a line of its own and
leaves the empty line above it in the document — 5mm per image. A picture the
file sizes to the column lands there anyway once its cm/EMU width is rounded
to whole px, which is how a full-width Word picture triggered it.
Word's inserted page number sits in a w:sdt, so the paragraph is not a child
of w:ftr and the whole zone came back empty. Mirrors what convertBlocks
already does for the body.
wrapText="bothSides" says nothing about the side, so every such frame floated
left — including the ones Word puts in the right half of the column, which
then pushed the text off the page's right edge instead of flowing beside it.
Word's Table Grid — the style nearly every real table names — sets space
after 0 and single line spacing in its own w:pPr, which is why a table's rows
are line-tight. The cell paragraphs were taking the document default instead.
An explicit single spacing is now written out as well: it only used to be
dropped as redundant, but the block's own style may set another one.
Word's List Paragraph carries it, so consecutive list points sit line-tight.
Without it every one of them took the document default's 8pt after, and a
document that is mostly bullets drifted more than a page.
A run with no font already fell back to the document's theme; the style did
not, so the registry held Standard and the headings without a family. Single
line spacing is measured against that family, so it resolved to the wrong one.
Its size is the block's line-height floor, not just an empty line's height:
10pt text in an 11pt style kept the taller strut and every line came out 0.4mm
high. Both importers now carry it as the blockFontSize attr whenever it differs
from what the block renders at, and the ODF export emits the FSZ sentinel for a
filled block too.
A list's own indent is the offset from the level's 1.27cm base, and the
importers dropped it when the file put the list left of that (w:ind w:left="360"
is a common one), so every item rendered 6.3mm too far right. The offset is
signed now, floored at the base so the list stays inside the text column.
blockDefaults(baseRun) made the Header/Footer style's own font the yardstick,
so a run matching it imported without marks. The zone carries no styleName and
no style CSS reaches it, so it then rendered in the editor default instead —
an Arial footer came back as Liberation Serif, 2.3mm narrow per line.
The mirror of the left indent (fo:margin-right, w:ind w:right) with its own
marker on the ruler. ODF export rides the PBX sentinel: odf-kit has a paragraph
option for the left indent but none for the right one.
Clearing direct formatting now resets the first-line and right indents as well —
no named style governs either, so both are always direct formatting.
Click the strip to place a stop of the selected type, drag to move it, drag it
off to drop it; the two triangles set the paragraph's first-line and left
indent. Sticky inside the scroll area, so it clears the toolbar island and
stays aligned with the page as it scrolls or zooms.
CSS only has the fixed tab-size grid, so a tab that resolves to one of the
paragraph's stops is measured and given the exact advance as an inline margin.
A hanging indent implies a stop at the text position, as in Word.
Only the block's left margin was read, so w:firstLine, w:hanging and
fo:text-indent were dropped: every hanging-indent paragraph rendered with
its first line flush with the rest instead of outdented.
Stored as the signed indentFirst attr in cm (negative = hanging) and
rendered as CSS text-indent. Word splits it into two exclusive
attributes by sign, ODF keeps one signed value.
Steffen Becker