Document Structure and Formatting
Now that you’ve been inundated with information
about lots of document-level constructs, let’s move
into the actual content of a Word document and how it is represented
in WordprocessingML. All Word documents contain three levels of
hierarchy: one or more
sections
containing zero or more
paragraphs
containing zero or more characters.
A
run is a grouping of contiguous characters that
have the same properties.
Tables can occur where
paragraphs can, and list items are just a special kind of paragraph.
You cannot have nested structures in WordprocessingML—sections
within sections, or paragraphs within paragraphs. The one exception
to this rule is that tables may contain tables.
Runs
A
“run” is the basic leaf container
for a document’s content and is represented by the
w:r element. As we’ve seen, the
w:r element may contain
w:t elements, which
contain text. Including the w:t element, there are
24 valid child elements of the w:r element,
representing things like text, images, deleted text, hyphens, breaks,
tabs, footnotes, endnotes, footnote and endnote references, page
numbers, field text, etc. We’ll look at just a few
of these.
The w:r element may occur in five separate element
contexts:
w:p,
w:fldSimple, w:hlink,
w:rt, and w:rubyBase. The first
one, the paragraph, is the most common. The
w:fldSimple element
represents a Word field, the
w:hlink element
represents a hyperlink in Word, and the
w:rt
(“ruby text”) and
w:rubyBase elements ...
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