Week 10 Lab: One Step of the Chain

Run a single format conversion on a document you know well and inventory exactly what did not survive it

26 April 2027

Before the session#

Bring a document you know the contents of well enough to notice what goes missing: ideally one with comments, tracked changes, footnotes, a table, or non-Latin characters in it. Pick a single conversion, not a chain. One step is enough to see the mechanism, and the Format Autopsy will want the full chain later.

In the session#

Perform the conversion, then compare source against target and itemise the losses. Itemise, not summarise: “three comments, both tracked insertions and their attribution, the table’s column widths” is a finding; “some formatting” is not. Include things that survived in altered form: a heading that is now merely large bold text has lost its status as a heading even though the words are intact.

Afterwards#

Identify one loss the target format did not require. Comments, for instance, survive in some DOCX-to-PDF converters and not others; the format can hold an annotation, and the converter chose not to write one. Separating what the format cannot carry from what the tool declined to carry is the whole distinction, and it is the one the Format Autopsy is graded on.