Fully transparent text fill

How the text is hidden

Text Effects → Text Fill → Transparency at 100% writes <w14:alpha w14:val="0"/> inside <w14:textFill><w14:solidFill>. It is two menus in Word. The run is still <w:t> text.

Why a model still reads it

Alpha is a paint property. Nothing an extractor reads is affected by it, so the words arrive intact.

What we do about it

The parser reads w14:textFill through the same layer chain as colour and size, so a transparency applied by a character style is found and not only a direct one; w14:val is thousandths of a percent. A run is marked zero-opacity when the resolved alpha is at or below limits.maxInvisibleOpacity, read from the rule pack. The rule fires at high with action flag. A run whose chain states no alpha resolves to null rather than to opaque — absent means the check has nothing to say.

How often it fires

0% of open-data portal DOCX — 150 real government publications, written in Word (genre: government, NOT contracts), measured 2026-08-18.

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.