The last group of settings stored in WordprocessingML is compatibility settings. Compatibility Settings are optional settings used to preserve visual fidelity of documents created in earlier word processing applications. Some of these settings provide affordance for specific behaviors, described in detail below; and others simply instruct applications to mimic the behavior of an existing word processing application.

If compatibility settings are needed, they are stored in the Document Settings part.

It is important to note that all compatibility settings are optional in nature - applications may freely ignore all behaviors described within this section and these settings should not be added unless compatibility is specifically needed in one or more cases. The compatibility settings are provided for backward compatibility with documents created in legacy applications. As such, a number of the settings reference specific applications and specific versions of those applications. This is solely for backward compatibility reasons, and any of those settings are ignorable.

[Example: Consider the following WordprocessingML fragment for the compatibility settings in a WordprocessingML document:

<w:settings>
…
<w:compat>
<w:noTabHangInd />
</w:compat>
</w:settings>

The compat element contains all of the document settings for this document. In this case, the single setting applied is the suppression of a tab stop when using a hanging indent using the noTabHangInd element (§2.15.3.37). end example]