Show HN: Open-source .docx editor library for building document apps

tthisisjedr about 23 hours ago 16 commentsRead Article on github.com

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

We are working on an open-source .docx editor library for apps that need to edit Word documents in the browser. We just shipped 1.0.

A lot of existing approaches convert .docx into HTML and lose document semantics along the way. Our editor parses OOXML directly and uses its own rendering+layout engine to produce paged documents with html/css. Edits round-trip back to .docx, so you’re always editing the document, not its representation.

The core rendering engine is framework agnostic, with React and Vue ui adapters on top.

It’s Apache 2.0. Happy to answer questions.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

86% Positive

Analyzed from 345 words in the discussion.

Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

aejm•about 8 hours ago

A really solid looking editor! Just a heads up on small, mobile screen sizes: the UI elements of the top row overlap unusably, the rest of the UI seems usable just quite zoomed in and I really had to pan around a lot to do anything. Fundamentally a solid and usable UI, I’d recommend a little more polish on smaller screen sizes. Good work!

thisisjedr•about 8 hours ago

Noted, and thanks for the feedback! It's on our roadmap to better support mobile experience

unD•about 11 hours ago

Hi! I was looking at `@eigenpal/docx-editor-agents`—would that be a viable option for fetching the content of Word docs in agentic workflows? I'm currently using Pandoc to extract an MD version, but I'm not sure how true to the actual document that is (e.g., with comments). Thanks!

6f17f2dd•about 5 hours ago

Do you plan to handle bigger documents? I tested your live demo with ~40 pages (copy pasting the demo) and was quite unusable for writing.

thisisjedr•about 5 hours ago

Thanks for reporting! We do have perf tests for editing docs over 50 pages, but something in the demo doc must indeed be slowing edits down, this is not expected behaviour. Filed an issue https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor/issues/590

pryelluw•about 19 hours ago

I’ve built something similar but for PDFs. Know the pain too well. Best wishes!

pulkitanand•about 17 hours ago

Interesting! Would love to check that out as well, have you released it?

pryelluw•about 16 hours ago

It was an internal enterprise tool that will never be public.

thisisjedr•about 13 hours ago

Thank you!

radial_symmetry•about 19 hours ago

Holy shit, this is exactly what I needed for a major client. The track changes specifically, and being able to do it from Typescript. You have no idea how happy you just made me.

Edit: Did you just make this repo public? Last week I was scouring the internet for something like this and couldn't find it.

thisisjedr•about 13 hours ago

Happy to hear that! :)

The repo has actually been public for ~3 months, but we only launched the project homepage https://www.docx-editor.dev recently, so search engines are still catching up.

> I was scouring the internet for something like this and couldn't find it.

Interested to hear how can we make it more discoverable? What keywords were you searching for ?

r0b05•about 9 hours ago

Excellent work

bradneuberg•about 17 hours ago

This looks amazing!

thisisjedr•about 13 hours ago

Thanks!

bobajeff•about 19 hours ago

This looks really impressive. How hard was it to implement this in typescript?

thisisjedr•about 13 hours ago

Thanks! The hard here part is not typescript implementation but it's catching Word undocumented quirks.

The OOXML spec gets you far but doesn't cover 100% of how Word renders things. Community feedback has helped a lot here, users attach docs (in gh issues) that break rendering, we can reproduce against Word, fix the engine, and keep tightening fidelity.