The piece table is a data structure that describes the logical sequence of characters in a Word document and records recent changes to the formatting of a Word document. It is stored in a Word file as a PLCF named the plcfpcd (PLex of Cps containing Piece Descriptors).The piece table relates a logical character number, called a CP (Character Position), to a physical location within a Word file (an FC). The array of CPs in the plcfpcd defines a partitioning of the Word document into disjoint pieces. The second array is an array of PCDs (Piece Descriptors) which is in 1-to-1 correspondence to the array of CPs that records the physical location in the Word file where the corresponding piece begins. To find the physical location of a particular logical character in a Word document, take the CP coordinate of that character within the document and find the piece that contains that character. This is done by finding the index of the largest CP in the array of CPs that is less than the character CP. Then reference the PCD with that index in the array of PCDs. The FC stored in the PCD gives the position of the beginning of the piece in the file. Finally, add the offset of the desired character from the beginning of its piece to the FC of the beginning of the piece. This gives a "virtual" file offset of the character. If the second most significant bit is clear, then this indicates the actual file offset of the unicode character (two bytes). If the second most significant bit is set, then the actual address of the codepage-1252 compressed version of the unicode character (one byte), is actually at the offset indicated by clearing this bit and dividing by two.