An unrecognised ignorable destination

How the text is hidden

RTF marks a destination ignorable with \*, which instructs any reader that does not recognise the destination's name to skip its contents entirely. The format is extensible by design, so the marker is what a producer puts in front of anything it invents. Words placed inside such a group are never drawn by a reader and are never removed from the file.

Why a model still reads it

The skip is a reader convention, not a storage decision. Extractors that walk the token stream and keep literal text emit the destination's contents alongside the body, which is the seen-by-one-side-and-not-the-other asymmetry this technique is named for.

What we do about it

\* sets a group-scoped ignorable flag, and the destination word that follows is checked against the parser's list of destinations the RTF and Word specifications define; only a name absent from that list keeps this technique's medium band, the rest move to the quiet one. The run's reason is non-rendered-part and the rule additionally requires run.flags.rtfSpecDestination != true. Two false-positive controls sit in front of it: non-body text containing no letter at all is dropped before it becomes a run, and field-instruction text goes through the same classifier DOCX uses, so { PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT }, { HYPERLINK "…" } and { MERGEFIELD … } are not findings. Action is flag: the words stay in the caller's text.

How often it fires

4.1% of 195 real RTF files from four national open-data portals (CA, UK, GR, AU) — 196 of 201 parse, measured 2026-08-31.

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.