Word Document Generation and Editing

Problem

Generating .docx files can fail in subtle ways once opened in Word: page size, table width, list styling, image scaling, page breaks, and TOC fields may not match expectations. Editing raw XML or doing string replacement is fragile because Word splits text into runs, adds revision marks, and applies style-dependent formatting. This skill frames the work as create, edit, read, and validate, giving engineers a practical code path for stable document output.

How It Works

• Create documents: prefer python-docx; the template references/docx_template.py covers headings, nested headings, tables, lists, footers, and page numbers. The npm docx package is another option.
• Edit existing files: open an existing .docx with Document('existing.docx') to append or modify content, or unzip the package, update word/document.xml, and repackage it.
• Read content: iterate over document.paragraphs, or convert with pandoc -t markdown file.docx for easier parsing.
• Validate output: convert the result to PDF to inspect layout, and use LibreOffice when converting legacy .doc files. Key details include using Inches for page dimensions, table.autofit or explicit column widths, List Bullet styles instead of literal bullets, WD_BREAK.PAGE for page breaks, and paragraph borders instead of table separators. For text replacement, iterate run.text values to avoid regex failures across split runs.

Boundaries

This is useful for programmatic submission documents, outline tables, contracts, resumes, and template-driven Word output. It is not a substitute for complex Office workflows such as mail merge, comments, approval chains, or Word plugin interactions. Optional tooling may be required for legacy .doc conversion and PDF validation.