Custom XML in Word documents

Microsoft lost another patent laws开发者_如何转开发uit (see also here) and I feel the pain too. I relied on the pink tags to have some attributes associated with text spans in a word documents. Such attributes were saved in the xml as custom tags.

Now, as soon as my customer upgrades Office suite they will loose the pink tags. Can you think of what features can I use in MS Word to re-implement the same functionality?

This depends on your Word version. In Word 2003 you might want to have a look at the Bookmark feature, from Word 2007 on you could also investigate Content Controls/Custom XML.