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Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

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Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#11
post #9

So it’s like Google Docs? What am I looking at exactly?

More vibe coded slop on Show HN

Would be more impressive if this was done for something obscure like Microsoft Visio. Theres countless oss ms word editors/libs Claude probably ripped off

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#12
post #11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More vibe coded slop on Show HN

Would be more impressive if this was done for something obscure like Microsoft Visio. Theres countless oss ms word editors/libs Claude probably ripped off

The schema Visio’s files save to is very complex.

There’s stuff like diagrams.net, but that’s not compatible.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, we know the editor isn't yet 1:1 with Word. When you built yours, was Word your source of truth (reverse-engineering sense), or did you stick to MS-OE376? And any recommended process for systematically uncovering those undocumented edge cases?

We went out and used our editor against our and customer's documents. The Open part of OOXML makes as much sense as the Open in OpenAI. Microsoft made OOXML available to fend off an antitrust lawsuit, there is no incentive for them to make it actually easy to build competing editors off their specification. FWIW the bug I found is that your comment parser assumes the w:date attribute represents a useful timestamp of…

Can you say the name of the editor your worked on?

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#15

Ah these poor fools. Having built this exact product (OOXML compatible editor in React) before, it took all of two minutes to find a bug. The issue is that the OOXML spec is not in fact definitive - Word is, and trying to implement it from the spec will produce something that works maybe 80% of the time then fall over completely when you hit one of hundreds of minor, undocumented edge cases. Assuming of course that C…

I feel your pain. PDF applications have the same problem. The thousand page PDF spec isn't actually the spec, Acrobat is the spec.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#16
Excellent work! To put out the importance of the project - as of today there is not many google docs/word online alternative that is completely open source.

I'm yet to dig the code on how pagination is implemented but if the page breaks mimick word's - this is huge!

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be more impressive if this was done for something obscure like Microsoft Visio. Theres countless oss ms word editors/libs Claude probably ripped off

The schema Visio’s files save to is very complex. There’s stuff like diagrams.net, but that’s not compatible.

Yup that’s why I suggested it. The vsdx schema is notably complex and I don’t see a lot of code examples in the wild. I seriously doubt an llm would be able to output working code for it. Docx is a common use case and a quick google search yields multiple popular libraries that understand the format. Anyways, cool that an llm was able to output a functional docx editor, but that’s certainly not impressive or a groundbreaking feat by any means

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#18
How far can Claude can take this beyond a cool demo.

Does it become exponentially harder to add the missing features or can you add everything else you need in another two days? I'm guessing the former but would be interested to see what happens.

Are you going to continue trying? I ask because it's only been two days and you're already on Show HN. It seems like if you waited for it to be more complete, it would have been more impressive.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#20

Excellent work! To put out the importance of the project - as of today there is not many google docs/word online alternative that is completely open source. I'm yet to dig the code on how pagination is implemented but if the page breaks mimick word's - this is huge!

Thank you!
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