<i>"as I understand it a large part of the point of Open XML is to preserve fidelity in archived documents"</i><p>No, the point was to preserve a monopoly. The stuff about preserving fidelity was just a smokescreen since anyone paying attention knows that Word has a long history of changing formatting depending on which printer you have plugged into a machine. If you want that kind of archival then use the PDF/A standard.
I wouldn't know how to write this bug...<p>It should serve as a testimony on how hard it is to implement Office Open XML. Not even Microsoft can get it right.
Noticed this the minute I installed the Office 2010 beta, but vice versa: the spaces from my Word 2007 document were gone. Made me go back to 2007: wasn't going to rewrite my 20 page report.
Link to original CNET article: <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20034213-92.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20034213-92.html</a><p>Link to original thread on Microsoft forum: <a href="http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/thread/2764c5ac-4f7c-4a6d-9419-9e37bddf82d8" rel="nofollow">http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wordshare/t...</a>
As far as I see this, he admits the problem at the end: Microsoft Word is a Word Processing program, not a publishing program.<p>You are not guaranteed to have your layout preserved when printing. This can be for a variety of reasons, but it could be simple stuff like having your file in A4-format and your printer only having papers of type "Letter" or something equally silly. In cases like these, Word is <i>forced</i> to reformat.<p>If you need or rely on a 100% accurate re-representation of your content, Word should not be your tool. Never. Use PDFs. Simple as that. If you are writing a normal texts however, it will probably never be a real problem which you will even notice.<p>Now, my question to the author (should he check out HN): How on earth is this related to OOXML? Where is the smoking gun saying this is a bug in the file-format? I honestly don't see it, and I don't see anyone else here questioning this unbacked claim.<p>I honestly expected better from HN.