Shipped: export to .docx with formatting fidelity
The boring feature that unblocks federal submissions. What formatting fidelity actually means, what we preserved, and what we couldn't.
We shipped .docx export with formatting fidelity this week. If your response has to be submitted as a Word document — which, for most federal and many state procurements, it does — the export no longer drops heading levels, table column widths, or list nesting when it hands back the file.
What “fidelity” actually means
Exports to .docx are easy. Exports to .docx that round-trip without breaking are not. The shipped version preserves:
- Heading styles. H1 through H4 map to Word’s built-in Heading 1 through Heading 4 styles, so the table of contents generated by the reviewer’s Word instance matches the structure the drafter saw.
- Numbered and bulleted lists, including multi-level nesting up to four levels. Prior version collapsed anything past level two.
- Tables with merged cells and defined column widths. A compliance matrix exported from the draft view keeps its widths instead of reflowing to the default.
- Inline citations. Inline citation markers render as Word cross-references to a sources appendix, so a reviewer clicking a citation in the exported file jumps to the same source list the draft view shows.
- Page breaks between major sections. This matters for submission packages where each volume is a separate file and the break needs to be deterministic.
What we couldn’t preserve
Three things, honestly:
- Custom font embedding. If your RFP template requires a specific font that isn’t one of the Word-standard fonts, the export uses your closest available match. Federal templates that require a specific agency font still need a manual pass in Word.
- Track-changes history. The draft view tracks edits; the
.docxexport doesn’t carry our internal edit history. Reviewers get a clean file, not an annotated one. We considered exporting as track-changes; the feedback was that reviewers already run their own Word edit cycles and didn’t want ours. - Comments on specific spans. We carry comments inside the draft view. The export drops them. This is a tradeoff we talked about for a month. Carrying comments produced an unfamiliar artifact in Word; dropping them produced a clean file. We picked clean.
How to get it
No opt-in. Any draft that exports to .docx uses the new path. If you have in-flight exports from before December 5 that used the old path, re-exporting will produce the higher-fidelity file.
VisibleThread has written about the federal submission problem — specifically, that submission-format mistakes are a non-trivial cause of proposal disqualification. Format fidelity on the export isn’t a growth feature. It’s a disqualification-avoidance feature.
Docs for the full format reference live at /docs/export/docx. If your proposal has a formatting requirement we don’t cover, the feedback form is the fastest path to a fix.