Custom Markup

Within a WordprocessingML document, it is often necessary for specific documents to contain semantic information beyond the presentation information specified by this Office Open XML specification. For example, an invoice document may wish to specify that a particular sentence of text is a customer name, in order for that information to be easily extracted from the document without the need to parse the text using regular expression matching or similar. For those cases, multiple facilities are provided for the insertion and round-tripping of customer defined semantics within a WordprocessingML document.

There are three distinct forms in which customer-defined semantics can be inserted into a WordprocessingML document, each with their own specific intended usage:

• Smart tags

• Custom XML markup

• Structured document tags (content controls)

The usage and presentation of each of these forms is described in the following sections.