Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 File Format Specification

Microsoft® Pocket Word 2.0 is the word processor component of Microsoft® Pocket Office 2.0 for the Handheld PC. The Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 file format is very similar to Rich Text Format (RTF). In fact, with one small change to the Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 file header, any RTF reader, (for example, Microsoft® Word), can read a Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 file. This document describes the file format of a Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 document.

While Pocket Word 2.0 files are very similar to RTF files, there are several differences:

• A Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 file has the header “{\pwd2” to allow readers to identify it as a Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 file. This compares with “{\rtf1” for RTF files, and “{\pwd1” for Microsoft Pocket Word 1.0 files. By changing a Microsoft Pocket Word header to be the RTF header, the file can usually be read by any RTF reader.
• Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 includes password protection of files to prevent unauthorized access. While the file header remains readable, the rest of the file is encrypted as binary data. This file format specification does not include details of the Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0 encryption algorithm.
• All picture data in the file is held as binary data and is preceded by the “\bin” RTF token. This is standard RTF; it is mentioned here because it is more common to see picture data held as ASCII text representing hexadecimal values for the data. By storing the picture data as binary data, the storage requirements are halved.
• The following two tokens are not standard RTF, but are recognized by Microsoft Pocket Word 2.0.
  • \pwd
  • \collapsed