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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8776?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17177047#comment-17177047
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Michael McCandless commented on LUCENE-8776:
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{quote}*But* then there's some interesting/advanced cases where the rule is 
simply impossible to follow.
{quote}
I am still struggling to understand what use cases are actually made impossible 
by {{IndexWriter}}'s enforcing of valid offsets.

I sent a reply to [~roman.ch...@gmail.com] on the dev list to [try to 
understand those examples 
better|https://lucene.markmail.org/thread/e424bcbnyevcufg6#query:+page:1+mid:5dulutmdqqubud6p+state:results].

While the cost of writing a negative {{vInt}} was one of the motivations for 
stricter offset checking, another (stronger?) motivation was catching buggy 
analysis components that were producing invalid offsets, causing problems only 
detected much later (at search time).  {{IndexWriter}}'s offset enforcement 
allows detecting such buggy {{TokenFilter}}s earlier.

> Start offset going backwards has a legitimate purpose
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: LUCENE-8776
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8776
>             Project: Lucene - Core
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: core/search
>    Affects Versions: 7.6
>            Reporter: Ram Venkat
>            Priority: Major
>
> Here is the use case where startOffset can go backwards:
> Say there is a line "Organic light-emitting-diode glows", and I want to run 
> span queries and highlight them properly. 
> During index time, light-emitting-diode is split into three words, which 
> allows me to search for 'light', 'emitting' and 'diode' individually. The 
> three words occupy adjacent positions in the index, as 'light' adjacent to 
> 'emitting' and 'light' at a distance of two words from 'diode' need to match 
> this word. So, the order of words after splitting are: Organic, light, 
> emitting, diode, glows. 
> But, I also want to search for 'organic' being adjacent to 
> 'light-emitting-diode' or 'light-emitting-diode' being adjacent to 'glows'. 
> The way I solved this was to also generate 'light-emitting-diode' at two 
> positions: (a) In the same position as 'light' and (b) in the same position 
> as 'glows', like below:
> ||organic||light||emitting||diode||glows||
> | |light-emitting-diode| |light-emitting-diode| |
> |0|1|2|3|4|
> The positions of the two 'light-emitting-diode' are 1 and 3, but the offsets 
> are obviously the same. This works beautifully in Lucene 5.x in both 
> searching and highlighting with span queries. 
> But when I try this in Lucene 7.6, it hits the condition "Offsets must not go 
> backwards" at DefaultIndexingChain:818. This IllegalArgumentException is 
> being thrown without any comments on why this check is needed. As I explained 
> above, startOffset going backwards is perfectly valid, to deal with word 
> splitting and span operations on these specialized use cases. On the other 
> hand, it is not clear what value is added by this check and which highlighter 
> code is affected by offsets going backwards. This same check is done at 
> BaseTokenStreamTestCase:245. 
> I see others talk about how this check found bugs in WordDelimiter etc. but 
> it also prevents legitimate use cases. Can this check be removed?  



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