Tracked changes disappear when a document round-trips through markdown

You export a .docx, run it through markdown or HTML, edit it, convert it back. Word opens the result and every revision mark is gone. Not rejected — gone. The edits are sitting there as ordinary text, as if someone had accepted them all and never said so.

Here is what Word had before the trip:

<w:p>
  <w:ins w:id="41" w:author="Priya" w:date="2026-08-14T09:12:00Z">
    <w:r><w:t>net thirty days</w:t></w:r>
  </w:ins>
  <w:del w:id="42" w:author="Priya" w:date="2026-08-14T09:12:00Z">
    <w:r><w:delText>net sixty days</w:delText></w:r>
  </w:del>
</w:p>

Two things there have no equivalent in markdown. The w:ins and w:del elements, which are what makes a change a tracked change rather than a fact. And w:delText, which is where deleted text lives — a deleted run does not use w:t at all. Convert that paragraph to markdown and you get one line of prose. Convert it back and you get one run of plain text. The wrappers are not corrupted in transit; there is simply nowhere to put them.

Comments go the same way and are easier to miss. A comment isn't stored in the paragraph — it lives in word/comments.xml, and the body only holds anchors pointing at it:

<w:commentRangeStart w:id="7"/>
<w:r><w:t>indemnity</w:t></w:r>
<w:commentRangeEnd w:id="7"/>
<w:r><w:commentReference w:id="7"/></w:r>

Drop the anchors and comments.xml is still in the file, still valid, and attached to nothing. The document opens cleanly and the review thread is gone.

How to tell whether your pipeline does this

Take a document with one tracked insertion and one comment. Send it through your pipeline. Then unzip the result and look:

unzip -o out.docx -d out/
grep -c "w:ins\|w:del" out/word/document.xml
grep -c "commentReference" out/word/document.xml

Zero on either line means the pipeline flattened your review history. Do this before it runs on anything that matters, because the failure is silent: the file opens, the text is right, and nothing warns you.

One caveat on the test itself: a document that had no tracked changes to begin with will also report zero, so use a file you know has them.

What to do instead

If the changes matter, don't round-trip through a format that can't hold them. Edit the OOXML in place, or use a tool that reads and writes the document as a document. If you must convert, convert a copy and treat the result as a new draft rather than the same document with edits applied — because that is what it is.

This is also the part of document tooling that is least settled. Converting files between formats has been answered for a decade. Keeping tracked changes and comments alive through an edit is being worked out in open pull requests right now, which is why it is worth checking rather than assuming.

Written 17 August 2026 by Sumit Negi, while applying for a role at SuperDocs. The XML above is from a test document I made; the author name is invented.