Introduction

docboss is a DOCX and DOC engine written from scratch in safe Rust against the specifications: ECMA-376 for Office Open XML WordprocessingML, and Microsoft's [MS-DOC], [MS-CFB], [MS-OLEPS], [MS-ODRAW] and [MS-OFFCRYPTO] for the Word 97-2003 binary format, its compound-file container and encryption. It has no C dependencies and no bindings to another engine: the ZIP container, the XML tokenizer, the compound-file reader, the font parsers, the layout engine and the rasterizer are its own. One core sits behind every surface: the docboss command-line tool, an interactive terminal explorer (docboss tui), a set of Rust library crates, and a native Python extension.

One model for two formats

A .docx file is a ZIP package of XML parts; a .doc file is a compound file holding a binary stream of text, a piece table and formatting records. Both readers produce the same document model (docboss-model): sections with their page setup, paragraphs and tables, runs with their properties, a style sheet that resolves effective formatting, list definitions that produce the document's own labels, footnotes, endnotes, comments, headers, footers, fields, bookmarks and media. Everything after reading (text, Markdown, HTML, JSON, layout, rendering, DOCX writing) works on that model, so it behaves the same for both formats. The format is detected from the leading bytes, never from the file name.

Leniency

Real-world files are damaged: truncated downloads, archivers that write a bad central directory, converters that break FAT chains or leave dangling relationships. docboss reads them anyway:

• A ZIP with a missing or broken central directory is read from its local headers; a damaged deflate stream keeps what inflated before the damage.
• A compound file with a looping or truncated sector chain is followed as far as it goes.
• XML that is not well formed still yields balanced elements.

Leniency never hides what it cost. Every approximated or dropped item is a Diagnostic on the document: docboss diagnostics lists them, and the libraries expose them as a value. An empty list means the reader took the file as written.

Scope

docboss reads, lays out, renders and writes word-processing documents. It does not edit a document in place and does not run macros. The limitations page lists what is missing, and the conformance ledger records the status of every clause of the standards it reads.