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Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

extend.ai

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Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

#1

Post by kbyatnal »

We're open-sourcing 14 components & examples today for PDF, DOCX, and XLSX viewers, plus bounding box citations, file upload, e-signature, and more. It's MIT licensed and fully customizable.

Demo video here: https://share.extend.ai/kRmSGKRF

When we started, we tried every file viewer and document component library we could find. Unfortunately, none of them had all the functionality (and polish) that we wanted, so we ended up building our own for https://extend.ai/. It was only ever meant to be internal, but enough customers kept asking for it that we decided to open source it.

It's useful for building document processing agents, real-time user facing document intake flows, or all kinds of internal tooling.

We naively thought this would be a solved problem. Turns out, making PDF/XLSX/DOCX viewers that work at scale is not trivial...we use and maintain it for Extend ourselves, so we've fixed a lot of edge cases that came up while running millions of pages / day through our own system. Our hope is that with our resources + community support, it'll keep getting better over time.

Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps
extend.ai

Re: Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

#4

Post by andrewlu0 »

warthog wrote: post #3

really like these - curious how the xlsx editor and viewer is built in that what kind of headless spreadsheet? could not have been easy

Hi! I'm one of the engineers at Extend that worked on this - one of our other engineers created a Rust XLSX/XLS parser that we ported to WASM to our @extend-ai/react-xlsx package which handles the rendering/charts. It exposes some hooks so users can use their own components for the toolbar

Re: Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

#5

Post by drivingmenuts »

andrewlu0 wrote: post #4
warthog wrote: post #3

really like these - curious how the xlsx editor and viewer is built in that what kind of headless spreadsheet? could not have been easy

Hi! I'm one of the engineers at Extend that worked on this - one of our other engineers created a Rust XLSX/XLS parser that we ported to WASM to our @extend-ai/react-xlsx package which handles the rendering/charts. It exposes some hooks so users can use their own components for the toolbar

How much was actual engineering and how much was telling an AI what to do?

Re: Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

#6

Post by CraigJPerry »

Those bounding box demos are decent.

By quirk of fate i've spent the past 2 days prototyping some stuff on pdfjs. Just trying to figure out a game plan for handling bounding boxes in the face of page zooming, different resolutions etc. etc. I can't see it mentioned whether the components are virtualising pages (as in reusing dom elements as document pages scroll by). I guess i just learned what i'll be exploring tomorrow then...

Re: Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

#7

Post by andrewlu0 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #6

Those bounding box demos are decent. By quirk of fate i've spent the past 2 days prototyping some stuff on pdfjs. Just trying to figure out a game plan for handling bounding boxes in the face of page zooming, different resolutions etc. etc. I can't see it mentioned whether the components are virtualising pages (as in reusing dom elements as document pages scroll by). I guess i just learned what i'll be exploring tomo…

yes - the pdf/docx viewer use react-virtual to virtualize the pages

the zoom should work with the bounding box highlights, we're working on adding rotation support

Re: Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

#10

Post by andrewlu0 »

spankalee wrote: post #2

These should really be web components. Leaving out every framework other than React is really bad for the web.

thats fair and definitely something we can try supporting in the future. we started with React because of how familiar models are with shadcn and tailwind

we hope this can be useful for people building in React though!

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