Is there a glossary of Word .docx XML tags?

Question

I'm trying to create a parser to find the tracked changes and author of a Word .docx file...

I found the document.xml but there are so many tags! Is there a glossary somewhere to what all those tags stand for?

I'd like to avoid brute forcing my way through this if possible.

Answer 1

The "Office Open XML" format and its XML vocabularies are described in detail in http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm .

To give you an idea, the following piece of XSLT should extract just the effective result text without tracked deletions of a wordprocessingML document, like would be stored under word/document.xml in a .docx file (a ZIP archive).

<!-- Match and output text spans except when
     appearing in w:delText child content -->
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main">
  <xsl:output method="text"/>
  <xsl:template match="w:t">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="w:delText"/>
  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

For your application to extract changes instead, you'd also have to take care of w:ins elements.