Range Permissions

A range permission refers to a special type of bookmark used to control which subset(s) of users may edit a particular region of a document. Range permissions specify the user, or set of users, that are allowed to edit all content between them whenever the document protection specified by the <documentProtection> element is enabled and set to readOnly or comments.

Like bookmarks, range permissions are a legacy word-processing function that predates the concepts of XML and well-formedness, so they can start and end at any location within a document's contents and, therefore, must use the cross-structure annotation format described in §2.14.3.

Consider the following WordprocessingML markup for a single paragraph, where a range permission has been added spanning the words range permission:

<w:p>
  <w:r>
    <w:t xml:space="preserve">This is a </w:t>
  </w:r>
  <w:permStart w:id="0" w:edGrp="everyone"/>
  <w:r>
    <w:t>range permission</w:t>
  </w:r>
  <w:permEnd w:id="0"/>
  <w:r>
    <w:t>.</w:t>
  </w:r>
</w:p>

The <permStart> and <permEnd> elements specify the location where the range permission starts and ends. The two tags are part of one group because the @id attribute value specifies 0 for both.

If document protection was enabled, then no content in this document shall be editable except for this range permission, which is editable by all users that open the document (specified using an editor group of everyone).