.DOC

Introduction

Word 6.0 for Windows, released in 1993, and Word 95 (also called Word 7) saved documents in this format. It was the first Word format stored in a compound file, and Word 6.0 for the Mac used it too, so files could move between the two systems. Word 97 replaced it with the Word 97 format, but kept the ability to save in it.

Text is stored in single-byte characters of a Windows code page, so a document can hold only the characters of one script without special handling.

Structure

The file is a compound file, which starts with the signature D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1 and holds named streams like files in a small file system. The document is the WordDocument stream. It begins with the File Information Block (FIB), which gives the version and the position and size of every other structure in the stream: the text, the character and paragraph formatting, the style sheet and the piece table. Summary information such as title and author is kept in separate streams.

In the FIB, wIdent at offset 0 is 0xA5DC, and nFib at offset 2 is 101 for Word 6.0 or 104 for Word 95.

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