Release note · August 1, 2026
Word review artifacts need a CI boundary too
Word already has useful interactive review workflows: legal blackline comparison and Document Inspector. But a controlled handoff or CI workflow has a different question: did this package gain unresolved revisions, comments, hidden runs, external relationships, macros, custom XML, or another opaque payload change—and can we answer that without turning a build artifact into a copy of the document?
DocFence 0.1.0 is a local-first CLI for that boundary. It compares `.docx` and `.docm` packages without opening Word, executing macros, evaluating fields, following links, rendering a document, or uploading source material.
More than a text diff
The visible body is only one stored story. DocFence inventories the body, headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, comments, and glossary parts; it also tracks revision markup, direct hidden-text runs, field codes, content controls, Track Changes, external relationships, custom XML, and macros. A generic opaque-payload signal covers mutations in parts the specialized inventories do not explain, such as styles, media, embeddings, metadata, and the package manifest.
The output intentionally contains counts and fixed change categories rather than paragraphs, comments, reviewer names, URLs, relationship targets, field instructions, custom XML values, macro bytes, part paths, or fingerprints. That makes JSON, Markdown, and SARIF practical for CI artifacts while keeping source material inside the team’s environment.
Policies that are small enough to review
A policy is a strict, short YAML file. It distinguishes a comparison boundary from a candidate-state boundary: a team can block a newly introduced external relationship while separately requiring that the candidate contain no comments or unresolved revisions at all.
version: 1
rules:
no_external_relationship_changes: true
no_macro_payload_changes: true
no_custom_xml_changes: true
require_no_unresolved_revisions: true
require_no_comments: true
require_no_hidden_text: truedocfence check exits nonzero when that policy finds a violation; it emits SARIF without locations, so a code-scanning integration does not need to receive a sensitive paragraph or package path. The policy reference documents the full rule set and strict format.
A bounded claim, not a rendering verdict
DocFence compares stored OOXML, not Word’s rendered result. It does not resolve styles or markup-compatibility choices, so direct stored hidden text is counted while style-inherited hiddenness is outside this first release. It is likewise not a legal-review substitute or a macro-safety scanner. The parser rejects unsafe ZIP/XML structures and records its limits and non-goals in the threat model.
That distinction matters. Microsoft’s legal blackline workflow and Document Inspector guidance remain valuable human-review tools. DocFence adds a reproducible package-state checkpoint around them.
Use the release
python -m pip install https://github.com/SybilGambleyyu/docfence/releases/download/v0.1.0/docfence-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
docfence diff approved.docx candidate.docx --format markdown
docfence init docfence.yml
docfence check approved.docx candidate.docx --policy docfence.yml --format sarif --output docfence.sarifDocFence is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub. For the spreadsheet counterpart, see Spreadsheet changes that can pass CI.