What is a "story" in the Text Object Model?

Question

This documentation describes RichEdit and ITextDocument, which are part of MFC. RichEdit uses TOM, or text object model. The documentation makes repeated reference to "stories":

The GetStoryCount property-get method retrieves the count of stories in this document.

The GetStoryRanges property-get method retrieves the story collection object used to enumerate the stories in a document.

At other places in the documentation, it's a unit of measurement of the document, in a progression like:

character > word > sentence > paragraph > story > page

But what exactly is a story?

Answer 1

As far as I've understood the RichEdit documentation, a "story" is somehow a unit just below "document". With RichEdit, however, it's irrelevant, as each RichEdit document can only have the one story.

My understanding is that, while RichEdit is the only Microsoft component that supports TOM with a publicly available interface, internally Word also supports TOM, and in fact TOM grew out of Word and Office, so TOM has various odd quirks that arise from that history. This can also be seen in, for example, various character styles supported by TOM, not all of which RichEdit handles.

In short, you can ignore "story" with RichEdit.