Word Default Template

Write a macro adding all default styles to new document and remove whole document content. Save it as default.docx.
Actually it is creating a new document adding all styles by hand and removing content from file as only by adding e.g. a new heading to the doc it will be in the XML (only styles used once are integrated).

Remove author from doc props after creation.

Still open on the 2.0.0 line. main was restarted from upstream v1.2.0, so it currently carries upstream's default template again, not the Word 16 one from 0.9.x.

Re-applying the Word 16 template is deliberately scheduled last among the code changes, because it alters default-styles.xml and the default document content that a number of tests assert against. Doing it before the feature work would mean repeatedly re-fixing that fallout.

Adding to the 2.0.0 milestone.

Not done — this one needs Microsoft Word and I have no way to run it. Leaving open, with what I found so a Word session is short.

Current state. The bundled src/docx/templates/default.docx already defines 164 styles: all nine heading levels and their Char variants, Title, Subtitle, Quote, Intense Quote, the List Bullet/Number/Continue families, Caption, TOC Heading, Book Title, and the full set of built-in table styles. It is not as bare as the issue implies.

What is actually missing. Comparing the defined styles against the w:latentStyles block in the same part, 12 styles are declared latent but never defined:

Bibliography, Placeholder Text, Revision, toc 1 … toc 9

More to the point, several styles the library itself writes by name are absent from the styles part entirely:

style id	written by
`CommentText`, `CommentReference`	upstream `Comment.add_paragraph()`
`FootnoteText`, `FootnoteReference`	`Footnote.add_paragraph()`, `Run.add_footnote_reference()` (#34)
`Hyperlink`	`Paragraph.add_hyperlink()`

Each of those currently works around the gap: comments and footnotes assign the style id straight to the element, bypassing the styles lookup that would raise, and Paragraph._add_default_hyperlink_style() synthesises a blue underlined character style on first use. Those workarounds are what fixing this would let us delete, so there is a concrete payoff.

Why I stopped. The remedy is to hand-author w:style definitions into word/styles.xml. Word's built-in style definitions are application defaults, not something ref/xsd/ or the ISO spec pins down, and there is no Word-authored source in the repo to lift them from — doc-word-default-blank.docx and doc-default.docx both define only 4 styles. So I would be guessing at the exact spacing, size and colour values, and a wrong guess silently changes the appearance of every document the library creates. That is not a trade I should make unilaterally on a binary asset.

Suggested procedure when you next have Word to hand, which is roughly what the issue describes:

New blank document from Normal.dotm.
Apply every style you want materialised at least once — Word only writes a style into styles.xml once it is used or explicitly marked. The 12 latent ones above plus the six in the table are the ones that matter.
Delete all body content, leaving a single empty paragraph.
Clear the author and last-modified-by core properties.
Save as src/docx/templates/default.docx.

Two things to check afterwards, because they will bite:

tests/test_reproducible.py pins byte-identical serialisation; a new template changes the expected bytes.
The current template still ships word/stylesWithEffects.xml, a Word 2010 artefact. A Word 16 save will drop it, which is fine, but the README claims "Word 16 (Office 2019) default template" and that claim is not true of the file we ship today — worth making it true in the same change, or dropping the claim.

I have removed that README line for now, since it described something that has not landed.

Status from a survey of the current template while working the 2.0.0 features.

src/docx/templates/default.docx now carries 164 style definitions (the 0.9.x one had ~39), which resolved #32. But the premise of this issue still holds: Word only writes a style definition once the style has been used, so several built-ins are still latent rather than defined. Confirmed absent from the current template:

header, footer, caption, heading 6, heading 7, heading 8, heading 9

Anyone applying one of those by name gets KeyError: no style with name 'header'.

This still needs the macro described here — create a document, use every built-in once so Word materialises it, delete the content, clear the author from the doc props, save as default.docx — and that needs a real Word install, so I have not attempted it. Leaving open.

Worth noting a partial workaround now exists for the cross-document case: Styles.copy_style_from() (#87) will lift a missing style out of a template document, with its w:basedOn / w:next / w:link closure. That does not remove the need for a complete default template.

Re-analysed the bundled template rather than relying on the earlier notes on this thread, and one of them was wrong.

Correction

The comment above listing header, footer, caption and heading 6–heading 9 as absent is not accurate against the current template. All seven are defined, and document.add_paragraph("x", style="Header") works today. That note appears to describe the 0.9.x template. Disregard it.

Actual inventory of `src/docx/templates/default.docx`

164 style definitions — 36 paragraph, 27 character, 100 table, 1 numbering — plus 137 w:lsdException entries.

Declared latent but never defined, 12:

toc 1 … toc 9, Placeholder Text, Revision, Bibliography

Written by the library itself but absent from the styles part, 5:

Hyperlink, CommentText, CommentReference, FootnoteText, FootnoteReference

Verified failures on a document straight out of Document():

>>> document.styles["Hyperlink"]
KeyError: "no style with name 'Hyperlink'"
>>> document.add_paragraph("x", style="Bibliography")
KeyError: "no style with name 'Bibliography'"
>>> document.add_paragraph("x", style="toc 1")
KeyError: "no style with name 'toc 1'"

Three of the five do not need Word after all

The objection that stalled this issue — that Word's built-in definitions are application defaults with no authoritative source in the repo, so hand-authoring them means guessing — holds for most of the list. It does not hold for these three. The repo already contains Word-authored definitions:

Hyperlink          features/steps/test_files/comments-rich-para.docx, par-hlink-frags.docx, par-hyperlinks.docx
CommentText        features/steps/test_files/comments-rich-para.docx
CommentReference   features/steps/test_files/comments-rich-para.docx

Authentic Word output, already under version control. Lifting them verbatim removes _add_default_hyperlink_style() and its guessed blue-underline character style. Split out as #117.

Separately: the template carries 447 KB of parts nothing needs

Turned up while measuring the above. Every document this library creates ships:


`word/stylesWithEffects.xml`	438 KB — the Word 2007 back-compat copy of the styles part, reltype `schemas.microsoft.com/office/2007/...`. Word 2013+ neither reads nor writes it.
`docProps/thumbnail.jpeg`	8.3 KB — a preview image of the template's page, shown by file managers as the generated document's thumbnail
`customXml/item1.xml` + props + rels	the template author's empty `b:Sources` bibliography store

A one-paragraph document is 826 KB uncompressed, of which styles.xml is 349 KB and stylesWithEffects.xml another 438 KB. Split out as #113 — also not blocked on Word.

What stays here

FootnoteText, FootnoteReference, the endnote pair (#94), toc 1–toc 9, Bibliography, Placeholder Text and Revision. None are in the fixture corpus, so these still want a Word session and the macro procedure described in the issue body, or a Word-authored source document from elsewhere.

Worth noting #116 makes that easier for end users regardless: bulk import_from() lets anyone pull authentic definitions out of any Word document they have, without waiting on us to ship them.

Also filed from this

The wider ask this issue kept bumping into — being able to see and manage what is in a document's styles part at all — is now #114 (usage analysis), #115 (cleanup and pruning), #116 (bulk import/extract) and #118 (an optional CLI).

Taking this off the 2.0.0 milestone so the release can go out. Not closing it — the work is still worth doing, it just is not a release blocker.

Why it does not block 2.0.0. Everything else on the milestone was a correctness or API-shape problem, the kind that is expensive to change after a major release. This is a quality improvement to the shipped template: a document generated today is valid and opens correctly, it just carries fewer built-in style definitions than one Word would produce, so a style has to be added before it can be applied. Landing it in 2.1 breaks nothing that 2.0.0 established.

Why it is not quick. It needs Word. The task is to author a document containing every built-in style, strip the content back out, and clear the author from the document properties — and there is no way to do that faithfully from this library, which is the whole point of the issue. That is a blocker of a different kind from the rest of the milestone, and it is not one more review pass can clear.

Related, and worth reading together:

Default template ships 447 KB of parts no generated document needs #113 — the default template ships 447 KB of parts no generated document needs. Same file, opposite direction: this issue adds definitions, that one removes dead weight. Whoever picks one should look at both, since they touch the same artefact and would otherwise conflict.
Adopt the Word-authored Hyperlink, CommentText and CommentReference style definitions #117 — adopting the Word-authored Hyperlink, CommentText and CommentReference style definitions. A narrow slice of the same problem.

One thing found while validating 2.0.0 output, recorded here because it belongs to whoever regenerates the template: the current default.docx carries <w:zoom w:val="bestFit"/> in word/settings.xml, which the ECMA-376 1st-edition schema in ref/xsd/ marks invalid — CT_Zoom requires w:percent. It is Word's own output and Word reads it back happily, so it is not a bug to fix here, but a regenerated template should be checked against the schema rather than assumed clean.

release: 2.0.0

Here is the macro. First, though — I measured what is actually missing, and the premise in the issue body is not quite right, which changes what "done" looks like.

What `default.docx` already has

style definitions : 164
latent entries    : 137
docDefaults       : present

So it is not the case that only styles used once made it in. All nine headings, the table styles, the list styles, Title, Subtitle, Quote, Caption and the rest are already defined. The gap is narrower and more interesting than "add everything".

Latent but undefined — 12

Bibliography      Placeholder Text      Revision
toc 1  toc 2  toc 3  toc 4  toc 5  toc 6  toc 7  toc 8  toc 9

Absent entirely — not even a latent entry

Hyperlink              FollowedHyperlink
annotation text        annotation reference     annotation subject
footnote text          footnote reference
endnote text           endnote reference

That second list is the one that matters, because it maps almost exactly onto what 2.0.0 shipped:

Missing style	Feature that needs it
`Hyperlink`, `FollowedHyperlink`	`Paragraph.add_hyperlink()`
`annotation text`/`reference`/`subject`	`Document.add_comment()` (these are the internal names for Comment Text / Comment Reference / Comment Subject)
`footnote text`, `footnote reference`	`Document.footnotes`, `Run.add_footnote_reference()`
`toc 1` … `toc 9`	the TOC field builder
`Placeholder Text`	content controls (`w:sdt`)
`Revision`	tracked changes
`endnote text`, `endnote reference`	#94, when endnotes land

A hyperlink added to a generated document today therefore has no Hyperlink style to reference, so Word renders it as ordinary text rather than blue-and-underlined. Same story for comment and footnote text. That is the concrete user-visible cost of this issue, and it is worth more than the tidiness argument.

It also subsumes #117, which asked for the Word-authored Hyperlink, CommentText and CommentReference definitions specifically.

The macro

Open Word, Alt+F11, Insert > Module, paste, and run GenerateDefaultTemplate. It writes default-generated.docx to your Desktop.

Option Explicit

' Generates a style-complete, content-free .docx for use as python-docx-ng's
' default template.
'
' Word keeps most built-in styles *latent*: styles.xml gets a w:latentStyles
' table listing them, but an actual w:style definition is only written once the
' style has been used. This applies every built-in style to throwaway content so
' Word materialises the definitions, then removes the content and the personal
' metadata, leaving the definitions behind.
'
' Run with `GenerateDefaultTemplate`. Tested on Microsoft 365.

Public Sub GenerateDefaultTemplate()
    Dim doc As Document
    Dim sty As Style
    Dim applied As Long, skipped As Long

    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    Set doc = Documents.Add                     ' -- from Normal.dotm --

    For Each sty In doc.Styles
        If sty.BuiltIn Then
            If ApplyStyleOnce(doc, sty) Then
                applied = applied + 1
            Else
                skipped = skipped + 1
            End If
        End If
    Next sty

    StripContent doc
    StripPersonalMetadata doc

    doc.SaveAs2 _
        FileName:=Environ$("USERPROFILE") & "\Desktop\default-generated.docx", _
        FileFormat:=wdFormatXMLDocument, _
        AddToRecentFiles:=False

    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
    MsgBox "Applied " & applied & " built-in styles (" & skipped & " skipped)." & vbCrLf & _
           "Saved to Desktop as default-generated.docx", vbInformation
End Sub

' Apply `sty` to throwaway content appropriate to its type. Returns True if it
' took. Each type needs a different carrier: a character style needs a run of
' text, a table style needs a table.
Private Function ApplyStyleOnce(doc As Document, sty As Style) As Boolean
    Dim rng As Range, tbl As Table, para As Paragraph

    On Error GoTo Failed

    Select Case sty.Type
        Case wdStyleTypeParagraph, wdStyleTypeParagraphOnly, wdStyleTypeLinked
            Set para = doc.Content.Paragraphs.Add
            para.Range.Text = "x"
            para.Range.Style = sty

        Case wdStyleTypeCharacter
            Set para = doc.Content.Paragraphs.Add
            para.Range.Text = "x"
            Set rng = para.Range
            rng.MoveEnd wdCharacter, -1         ' -- exclude the paragraph mark --
            rng.Style = sty

        Case wdStyleTypeTable
            Set para = doc.Content.Paragraphs.Add
            Set tbl = doc.Tables.Add(Range:=para.Range, NumRows:=2, NumColumns:=2)
            tbl.Style = sty

        Case wdStyleTypeList
            Set para = doc.Content.Paragraphs.Add
            para.Range.Text = "x"
            para.Range.ListFormat.ApplyListTemplateWithLevel _
                ListTemplate:=ListGalleries(wdNumberGallery).ListTemplates(1)
            para.Range.Style = sty

        Case Else
            GoTo Failed
    End Select

    ApplyStyleOnce = True
    Exit Function

Failed:
    ' -- a handful of built-ins cannot be applied to ordinary body content;
    ' -- their definitions are not worth failing the run over --
    ApplyStyleOnce = False
End Function

' Remove every trace of the throwaway content, leaving one empty paragraph.
Private Sub StripContent(doc As Document)
    Dim tbl As Table, shp As Shape, i As Long

    For i = doc.Tables.Count To 1 Step -1
        doc.Tables(i).Delete
    Next i
    For i = doc.Shapes.Count To 1 Step -1
        doc.Shapes(i).Delete
    Next i
    For i = doc.InlineShapes.Count To 1 Step -1
        doc.InlineShapes(i).Delete
    Next i

    doc.Content.Delete
    doc.Content.Style = doc.Styles(wdStyleNormal)   ' -- the surviving paragraph --

    ' -- list templates left behind by the list styles would ship numbering.xml
    ' -- entries no generated document references --
    On Error Resume Next
    doc.Content.ListFormat.RemoveNumbers
    On Error GoTo 0
End Sub

' Clear author and other identifying metadata. Word stamps these from the
' machine that created the file, and they would otherwise ship in every
' document generated from this template.
Private Sub StripPersonalMetadata(doc As Document)
    On Error Resume Next
    With doc
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyAuthor).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyLastAuthor).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyComments).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyTitle).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertySubject).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyKeywords).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyCompany).Value = ""
        .BuiltInDocumentProperties(wdPropertyManager).Value = ""
        ' -- Word 2013+; strips residual personal info Word tracks separately --
        .RemoveDocumentInformation wdRDIDocumentProperties
        .RemoveDocumentInformation wdRDIRemovePersonalInformation
    End With
    On Error GoTo 0
End Sub

On macOS, replace the SaveAs2 path with something like
MacScript("return (path to desktop folder) as string") & "default-generated.docx", or just save through the UI afterwards.

Verify before committing it

Word may or may not persist every definition once the content is gone — worth checking rather than assuming. Run this against the generated file:

import re, zipfile

s = zipfile.ZipFile("default-generated.docx").read("word/styles.xml").decode()
defined = set(re.findall(r'<w:name w:val="([^"]+)"/>', s))
latent = set(re.findall(r'<w:lsdException w:name="([^"]+)"', s))

print(f"defined: {len(defined)}  latent: {len(latent)}")
for want in ("Hyperlink", "annotation text", "annotation reference",
             "footnote text", "footnote reference", "toc 1", "toc 9",
             "Placeholder Text", "Revision", "Bibliography"):
    print(f"  {want:<22}", "ok" if want in defined else "STILL MISSING")

from docx import Document
d = Document("default-generated.docx")
assert len(d.paragraphs) <= 1, f"content left behind: {[p.text for p in d.paragraphs]}"
assert not d.core_properties.author, f"author still set: {d.core_properties.author!r}"
print("content and author clean")

Three things to check by eye as well:

Size. The current template is 38 KB. More definitions will grow it, and Default template ships 447 KB of parts no generated document needs #113 is about trimming this same file — do not let the two pass each other. Worth comparing before and after.
w:zoom. The current template carries <w:zoom w:val="bestFit"/>, which the ECMA-376 1st-edition schema in ref/xsd/ rejects — CT_Zoom requires w:percent. It is Word's own output and Word reads it back happily, so it is not a bug to fix, but check whether a freshly generated file still has it rather than inheriting the assumption.
Theme part. Style definitions referencing w:asciiTheme resolve against the document's theme. Confirm the generated file ships the same theme the current one does, or theme-font styles will render differently.

If you would rather not run macros, the fallback is manual and nearly as good: create a document, apply each style from the Styles pane once, delete the content, then File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document to strip personal information. Tedious but it produces the same artefact.

Still blocked on having Word available, but two-thirds smaller than it was.

#139 split out and landed the parts that did not need Word:

Adopt the Word-authored Hyperlink, CommentText and CommentReference style definitions #117 — Hyperlink, CommentText, CommentTextChar and CommentReference lifted verbatim out of features/steps/test_files/comments-rich-para.docx, which is authentic Word output rather than a guess at what Word would write. That was the objection that stalled this issue, and for those it does not apply.
Default template ships 447 KB of parts no generated document needs #113 — the template is 826 KB uncompressed down to 376 KB, with stylesWithEffects.xml, the thumbnail and the template author's bibliography store gone.

What is left here: FootnoteText, FootnoteReference and the endnote pair EndnoteText/EndnoteReference. None is in the repo's fixture corpus, so they still need a Word session or a Word-authored document from elsewhere. #94 landed endnotes in #139 and assigns EndnoteText/EndnoteReference by id, the same workaround the footnote code already used, so those four are now the whole of the remaining gap.

Note that #116's Styles.import_from() is a practical route for anyone who has such a document: it will pull authentic definitions into a generated document without anyone hand-authoring w:style elements.

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Word Default Template #23

Correction

Actual inventory of `src/docx/templates/default.docx`

Three of the five do not need Word after all

Separately: the template carries 447 KB of parts nothing needs

What stays here

Also filed from this

What `default.docx` already has

Latent but undefined — 12

Absent entirely — not even a latent entry

The macro

Verify before committing it

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Word Default Template #23

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toxicphreAK commented on Aug 3, 2026

toxicphreAK commented on Aug 3, 2026

toxicphreAK commented on Aug 3, 2026

toxicphreAK commented on Aug 4, 2026

Correction

Actual inventory of src/docx/templates/default.docx

Three of the five do not need Word after all

Separately: the template carries 447 KB of parts nothing needs

What stays here

Also filed from this

toxicphreAK commented on Aug 5, 2026

toxicphreAK commented on Aug 5, 2026

What default.docx already has

Latent but undefined — 12

Absent entirely — not even a latent entry

The macro

Verify before committing it

toxicphreAK commented on Aug 5, 2026

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Actual inventory of `src/docx/templates/default.docx`

What `default.docx` already has