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Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

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21–30 of 59 posts

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#21
post #10

Interesting because I'm building ooxml-cli right now, for editing pptx, docx, xlsx. At work I had to adapt a pptx to a corporate template and tried via agent. It kept failing so I started building and then it was able to relatively quick and accurate do what I needed. Then I needed it to make tables, add pictures. Recently wanted to get data from an xslx and replace text in a presentation etc. So the tool is growing…

I have a bunch of goodies at https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/go-ooxml and https://rcarmo.github.io/projects/python-office-mcp-server you might enjoy then.

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#23
post #11

If someone actually got "pixel-faithful" Office documents rendering correctly, MS would be screwed. That's actually really important for a lot of companies that carry around decades-old templates that never look exactly right in LibreOffice or any other software that attempted to replicate it. The slightest misalignment of a paragraph means a line on page 27 of 120 now moved down by 2 pixels, screwing everything else…

Sadly, Microsoft 365 is not “pixel perfect” compared to word. I often run into headaches where line numbers are different between the two and content ends up on different pages.

If Microsoft can’t get consistent rendering of word docs between Word for Windows, Word for macOS and Office 365, I don’t like anyone else’s chances.

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#24
post #15

The post title about it being "pixel-faithful" is a bit strange. I don't see that claim in the repo, and they don't seem to even claim full feature support at the moment. And for the features marked as supported in .pptx's, it does seem that at least slide image backgrounds and bullet point images aren't actually working, and some text objects have inverted text colors. Seems quite far away from being pixel-faithful…

That phrasing was taken from their website: https://ooxml.silurus.dev/

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#25
post #11

If someone actually got "pixel-faithful" Office documents rendering correctly, MS would be screwed. That's actually really important for a lot of companies that carry around decades-old templates that never look exactly right in LibreOffice or any other software that attempted to replicate it. The slightest misalignment of a paragraph means a line on page 27 of 120 now moved down by 2 pixels, screwing everything else…

I've heard that the same file can render differently in MS Word across different machines and OSs. So, that won’t help either.

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#26

Its kind of sad that the first thing in the repo is a mention that no human was involved in the programming.

Total "Damn if I do, damn if I don't" situation . I put a similar disclaimer on my AI stuff too. It would be much easier if they didn't mention it. But if they're like me, they want to give people the means for an informed decision. We can respect that and move on. Do we even know if actual big software companies aren't doing it?

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#27
I literally had to solve the "preview Office files in the browser" problem last week. I couldn't find a decent solution, so I ended up making a endpoint that ran the files through headless libreoffice on the server to convert them to PDF.

For PPTX and DOCX, this solution is slightly worse than libreoffice conversion (this does not appear to output highlightable text, while PDF conversion does).

However, the XLSX preview BLEW my mind considering this was AI coded. Really good, even interactive!

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#28
post #27

I literally had to solve the "preview Office files in the browser" problem last week. I couldn't find a decent solution, so I ended up making a endpoint that ran the files through headless libreoffice on the server to convert them to PDF. For PPTX and DOCX, this solution is slightly worse than libreoffice conversion (this does not appear to output highlightable text, while PDF conversion does). However, the XLSX prev…

> ...this does not appear to output highlightable text

Yeah, it does.

https://ooxml.silurus.dev/storybook/?path=/story/docxviewer-...

Re: Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas

#29
post #28
post #27

I literally had to solve the "preview Office files in the browser" problem last week. I couldn't find a decent solution, so I ended up making a endpoint that ran the files through headless libreoffice on the server to convert them to PDF. For PPTX and DOCX, this solution is slightly worse than libreoffice conversion (this does not appear to output highlightable text, while PDF conversion does). However, the XLSX prev…

> ...this does not appear to output highlightable text Yeah, it does. https://ooxml.silurus.dev/storybook/?path=/story/docxviewer-...

I can't highlight text in Safari or Firefox on my iPhone (iOS 26.5), at least on that first page.

I'm not familiar with this application, so perhaps I'm missing a step, and editing mode.

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