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Comment by Octoth0rpe | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting approach. I'm concerned about the use of LibreOffice as your source of truth. Would it be possible to swap out LibreOffice for actual MS Word in this workflow? This also could reveal some libreoffice rendering bugs/edge cases that are worth filing bugs over.

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I don’t have MS word installed on my development machine, so I haven’t done much testing with Word, but that does sound like a good idea to run the suite using Word. For what it’s worth I did not notice any issues with LibreOffice, even after running many iterations and tests.

I would add a +1 for testing w/ Word - the official Office suite runs some validation where only Word will show a "broken file" popup, even when nothing else does.

In our case, clients use only real Word, so any machine-generated/mutated files (excel/ppt as well) need a pass through the real office executable.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll add Word validation to my todo list.

In my experience a docx that looks good in libreoffice usually looks good in word, it's the other way around that is usually more of a problem.

I spent two days last week trying to figure out why a docx file I was generating with python-docx looked fine in libreoffice but would not open in word. it was just some text with a circle overlaid on it, but word is a lot fussier about the xml structure of the document than libreoffice is. finally had to create the same structure directly in msword and have claude examine the two files for differences.

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