I'm posting too much on this topic :-) Just a quick word from someone whose job it was to write filters for these file formats. They are not deliberately obfu

I'm posting too much on this topic :-) Just a quick word from someone whose job it was to write filters for these file formats. They are not deliberately obfuscated. They are just the product of long lived legacy projects with short deadlines and poor process. It is absolutely obvious when you work with the formats that this is the case. Word in particular was clearly just a dump of the internal data structures in the app. It's not even that complicated -- the complicated bits come later and they are all for either backwards compatibility or for the fast save feature (or whatever it was called). The fast save, in particular, is complicated and is that way because it is append only. It is essentially a series of patches on the original data structures. Yes, it will make you want to rip your hair out, but it is very, very obvious why it's that way.