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It actually seems like a sane choice to me. PDF is good for rendering, but horrible for parsing. DOCX is a ZIP file with XML data. Maybe ODT or whatever would've been a better choice, I don't know what the format is like. But if you disregard the usual knee-jerk "but it's Microsoft!" reaction, it doesn't seem like a bad choice.

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The Office Open XML file format is extremely complex, and takes up around 6,500 pages (compared to ~1000 for ODF). One thing you notice when reading the DOCX spec is that they designed it with the sole constraint that DOC files could easily be converted to DOCX. For example, you'll frequently see compatibility tags like "autoSpaceLikeWord95", "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8", "useWord2002TableStyleRules", and "lineWrapLikeWord6" that expose internal implementation details. Rather than creating a useful standard allowing all users to store their documents in a clean, portable way, Microsoft decided to make their standard faithfully reproduce all of the quirks and bugs of their legacy binary formats. It's so difficult to correctly implement the Office Open XML standard that even Microsoft took until Office 2013 to do so (the standard was approved in 2006).

Interesting! How do they compare feature-wise? I feel like there must be things each of them support that the other one doesn't, but I don't know how consequential they are.

I don't know how thorough or accurate it is, but Microsoft has a list.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/differences-betwe...

The list was only a few lines the last time I looked years ago, so maybe they're actually trying to make a complete list.

So true. "It's XML, so it must easy to parse and manipulate" is such a naive, even misleading attitude. If what you do is take a byzantine, legacy-encrusted implementation and just serialise its data strucures to an XML representation, very little has been gained.

[edit: but I will grant that almost anything is better than attempting to parse useful content from PDF.]

I had a CTO who told me that "anytime someone says something will be simple because it uses XML, just repeat what they said and use the word text instead of XML. Then tell me if it sounds smart."

*Uses regular expressions to parse binary XML*

In fairness though this a really good point.

> "autoSpaceLikeWord95", "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8", "useWord2002TableStyleRules", and "lineWrapLikeWord6"

I expect that whatever tooling the USPTO uses can probably just ignore those things. They're extracting metadata, not actually rendering it.

I think they pretty much had to do that to preserve the formatting of existing documents for users who are force-upgraded by their employers to new Office versions. But it seems a scraper that just wants the information in the document can ignore almost all of those tags.

edit: ninja'd.

Microsoft "adopted" XML purely to assuage various regulators that their new format was totally gonna be open, interoperable and standardized. It is a pure fig leaf but judging by all the comments in here mentioning "XML", it seems to have worked.

Was just about to post this. Unzipping DOCX and parsing XML is much easier than accurately processing PDF submissions.

OCR has come a long way, so much that visually interpreting a PDF is about as error-prom as parsing XML output from Microsoft in non-microsoft software.

Try extracting tabular data from a PDF! With XML it's trivial, but for PDF you need highly specialized software packages to do this. One of the best, pdfplumber, is largely based [1] on a Master's thesis titled Algorithmic Extraction of Data in Tables in PDF Documents [2].

[1] https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/blob/stable/pdfplumber/...

[2] https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/21520/Nurmi...

This was mostly aimed at the various ways the XML document may or may not conform to any number of XSD types. What we 'see' as a table might not be described and stored as a table in the same way in XML. And with XML I mean whatever XML office (the one from microsoft) generates.

A 6000-page spec and attributes that specify if the data is tabular data based on various properties (be it columns and rows or just plain text with start and stop pointers) and then may or may not render it visually as a table is error prone, even on first-party implementations (first-party desktop versions within Windows vary, as wel as on macOS, Android, iOS and their web offering).

If there was one simple data structure describing the table and all other aspects being optional, then yes, a XML based format is easier than OCR. But that's not the case I was pointing at.

> for PDF you need highly specialized software packages to do this.

Not really, or at least not all that specialized. You need:

a: a pdf-to-raster-image converter (ie any working PDF viewer, plus maybe the X server it talks to)

b: a reasonably decent OCR system capable of scanning tables (definitely nontrivial, but hardly "highly specialized" since things other than PDFs display data in tables).

Why not make yet another XML standard for patents and generate PDFs from it?

Or just use Docbook and the standard, open pipelines for publication to print and web.

I was saying it half-sarcastically because of how many "universal" XML standards are out there and how useless they are.

I wrote DDEX parsers in the past and I wish it never existed...

I never said it was a bad choice, only that they didn't say why they chose it.

I guess, but you were replying to "I was wondering why docx format would be chosen instead of PDF" seemingly unconvinced, so I assumed you thought PDF would've made more sense.

Neither of these are sane. PDF and DOCX are both built to ape analog paper processes. It's been 40 years of this computer thing, it's time to get rid of the 70s office facsimiles.

I think the knee-jerk is against any alternative to Office, not against Office. Statistically speaking, trying to use anything reasonable that doesn't genuflect to Microsoft's monopoly is what seems to be met with a knee-jerk reply such as yours. As in, there's probably more people who don't care but hate the complaining about libre stuff than their are advocates for libre stuff.

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