Word's hidden text attribute

How the text is hidden

<w:vanish/> sits in a run's properties, or is inherited from a character or paragraph style. The run itself is an ordinary <w:t> element in word/document.xml and is unchanged. Print Layout — the default view a reviewer opens the file in — draws none of it.

Why a model still reads it

Every DOCX-to-text path reads <w:t> elements. The concealment is a formatting property on the run, not a property of the text, so it does not survive into anything an extractor returns — the words do.

What we do about it

The parser resolves w:vanish through the whole style chain, honouring the nearest explicit switch, so w:val="false" on a nearer layer un-hides text a style hid. That sets the run's reason to hidden-attr. The rule fires on that reason for DOCX while excluding blocks whose role is altText or comment, at high, with action strip: the text is removed from the canonical text and from the cleaned file, because the property is invisible by specification.

How often it fires

0% of open-data portal DOCX — 200 real government publications, written in Word (genre: government, NOT contracts), measured 2026-08-23.

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.