Is there a markup language underlying MS Word and Libre Office?

Question

I'm curious about the backend for WYSIWYG editors (specifically librewriter and MS Word).

I know that you can produce fancy and nicely typeset documents using LaTeX, TeX and HTML+CSS. I was wondering if any of these markup languages (or something similar) underlies popular word processing software packages?

Answer 1

The markup language used by MS Word's DOCX format is covered by Standard ECMA-376 Office Open XML File Formats, aka OOXML. Libre Office can also import and export DOCX.

See also:

• Where can I find the XSDs of DOCX XML files?
• XML/XSD validation for a Word doc
• Microsoft Word (OOXML/DOCX) documents formatting validation
• Eric White's Open XML blog

Answer 2

Both MS Office and Open/Libre Office use XML for the stored document representation format (see http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm for MSO and https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office for Open/Libre Office; some of the specs have been republished as ISO standards). Basically, a .docx file is a ZIP archive containing XML files. Though neither of these office suites, being WYSIWYG-era software, started with a markup-based format as native storage format. Well-known text processors based natively on markup/plain text are WordPerfect and IBM SCRIPT/VS (the latter one introducing GML which later was extended to SGML and forming the base for both HTML and XML).

Answer 3

There are several sites with useful information about the OOXML file format. OfficeOpenXML has the most verbose explanations of OOXML. Other sites, like datypic.com and c-rex.net are mostly repackagings of the ECMA specs in a more readable form. I write about OOXML from the point of view of useful techniques for common Office problems: OOXML Hacking: Locking Graphics