Review comments in a deck

How the text is hidden

Comments live in their own parts rather than in the slide. PowerPoint has written two shapes over time: the legacy ppt/comments/comment1.xml, whose words sit in <p:text>, and the modern ppt/modernComments/modernComment_*.xml, whose words are DrawingML <a:t> runs. A file round-tripped through a current PowerPoint moves from one to the other.

Why a model still reads it

The comment parts are text in the package. Nothing in a comments part is shown while presenting, but any reader that walks the file picks the words up as ordinary prose.

What we do about it

The parser enumerates both part-name families, collects p:text and a:t elements in document order, joins them and collapses whitespace. Any part with non-empty text becomes a container holding one comment block whose run is marked invisible with the hidden-attr reason — set unconditionally, since there is no flag distinguishing one comment from another. The rule requires PPTX, the comment block role and that reason. Severity informational with the action disclose: a comment is the ordinary working state of a document under revision, so it produces a note and no alarm, though it still withdraws certified. visibilityOf maps hidden-attr to editing-only.

How often it fires

0.83% of 120 real Zenodo conference decks (corpus-zenodopptx as re-fetched 2026-08-23), measured 2026-08-24.

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.