Prose in a footnote separator
Real prose sits in a footnote or endnote whose type is Word's furniture, in a document that references no note of that kind — so nothing ever draws it.
How the text is hidden
word/footnotes.xml and word/endnotes.xml carry notes typed separator and continuationSeparator, which exist to hold the horizontal rule drawn above footnotes. Word writes them into every file it saves. A separator is only drawn when the document actually has a note of that kind; with no reference, it is never painted.
Why a model still reads it
The note part is ordinary WordprocessingML and its runs are returned by anything that walks the package. The words appear nowhere a reader looks.
What we do about it
The parser collects the ranges of notes whose w:type is separator or continuationSeparator, and applies them only when the document part contains no w:footnoteReference or w:endnoteReference of that kind. The run must contain a letter, because a separator legitimately holds a glyph or a page number. The reason is unrendered-note; the rule fires at informational, action flag. It is deliberately excluded from the certifiable-disclosure set, so a payload here yields clean but withholds certification.
How often it fires
6.3% of real commercial legal DOCX — 1,586 English contracts and agreements (corpus-legaldocx), mixed A4 and Letter, measured 2026-08-29.
This is an alert-volume number and nothing else. It says how often the alarm sounds on documents as found — not how often it is right, and not whether what it found was harmless. Documents as found may themselves carry concealment. Read it against the population named above rather than as a property of documents in general.
Check your own file
Three commands: a key, credit, a verdict.
Start with the API