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Well, I am a freelancer and not a native English speaker.

I am taking a look at job requirement what my client sent to me.

Here is what I am asking.

"We want this product built OFF of XXX platform".

Client brought XXX from a marketing site.

As seen above, OFF is being with upper-case letter that seems like my client is going to emphasize something that is most important.

I can't understand what is client's need really and exactly.

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  • Search for “off of” in the search box. This has been asked and answered several times. – Xanne Feb 3 '18 at 5:22
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    Perhaps the client's capitalisation is simply his alternative to italics, denoting emphasis. In which case my default reading would be We want it built off of / away from / without using the XXX platform (client has some reason why he definitely doesn't want to use XXX to build the product). – FumbleFingers Feb 3 '18 at 14:50
  • @FumbleFingers: It appears that you want to add an answer to this question. – Scott Feb 3 '18 at 23:24
  • @Scott: What I wanted was more context from the OP. We don't even know if the source was a native Anglophone (or his nationality, since that could make a difference). Given the full context, we might be able to guess why he capitalised OFF there, but maybe not even then. Heck! For all I know he originally wrote something like [We want it] built using the development features of XXX. Then maybe he decided to replace the highlighted element there with OFF, but forgot to toggle off CapsLock (which he'd just turned on to write XXX). – FumbleFingers Feb 4 '18 at 16:21
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As OFF is in capitals it looks to be an acronym (possibly pronounced 'oh eff eff' rather than 'off'), searching the web for OFF as an acronym I found two which relate to Object Oriented Programming (or OOP).

The first one is

Object File Format: Object files participate in both program linking and program execution. For convenience and efficiency, the object file format provides parallel views of a file's contents

The second one is

Object File Factory: an object for creating other objects – formally a factory is a function or method that returns objects of a varying prototype or class[1] from some method call, which is assumed to be "new".[a] More broadly, a subroutine that returns a "new" object may be referred to as a "factory", as in factory method or factory function. This is a basic concept in OOP, and forms the basis for a number of related software design patterns

They could be using either meaning of the acronym, neither expansion really fits into the sentence but the second makes a little more sense giving

We want this product built Object File Factory of XXX platform

If this meaning is, indeed, what the writer intended it would have been better written as

We want this product built using the Object File Factories of the XXX platform

My suspicion is that this is what was intended but they got someone with little or no knowledge of OOP (and possibly an imperfect knowledge of English) to write up the job specification so the spec got a bit mangled. I think it would be quite reasonable to ask them if they were using OFF in this sense, even if they are using an OFF acronym I haven't managed to find you will still look as though you know what you're doing!

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