Range permissions in a WordprocessingML document refer to a special type of bookmark used to control which subset(s) of users may edit a particular region of a document. Range permissions specify the user or set of users which are allowed to edit all content between them whenever the document protection specified by the documentProtection element (§2.15.1.28) is enabled and set to readOnly or comments.

Like bookmarks, range permissions are a legacy word processing function which predates the concepts of XML and well-formedness, so they can start and end at any location within a document's contents and therefore must use the "cross-structure" annotation format described in §2.13.2.

[Example: Consider the following WordprocessingML markup for a single paragraph, where a range permission has been added spanning the words range permission:

<w:p>
<w:r>
<w:t xml:space="preserve">This is a </w:t>
</w:r>
<w:permStart w:id="0" w:edGrp="everyone"/>
<w:r>
<w:t>range permission</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:permEnd w:id="0"/>
<w:r>
<w:t>.</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>

The permStart and permEnd elements (§2.13.7.1; §2.13.7.2) specify the location where the range permission starts and ends. The two tags are part of one group because the id attribute value specifies 0 for both.

If document protection was enabled, then no content in this document shall be editable except for this range permission, which is editable by all users that open the document (specified using an editor group of everyone). end example]