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Show HN: Open-source .docx editor library for building document apps
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.
- pryelluw 4mo agoI’ve built something similar but for PDFs. Know the pain too well. Best wishes!
- pulkitanand 4mo agoInteresting! Would love to check that out as well, have you released it?
- pryelluw 4mo agoIt was an internal enterprise tool that will never be public.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- thisisjedr 4mo agoThank you!
- radial_symmetry 4mo agoHoly 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 4mo agoHappy to hear that! :) The repo has actually been public for ~3 months, but we only launched the project homepage https://www.docx-editor.dev 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 ?
- radial_symmetry 4mo agoI had been having claude/openAI do web search for typescript docx libraries.
- bobajeff 4mo agoThis looks really impressive. How hard was it to implement this in typescript?
- thisisjedr 4mo agoThanks! 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.
- mckim890 4mo ago[flagged]
- bradneuberg 4mo agoThis looks amazing!
- thisisjedr 4mo agoThanks!
- unD 4mo agoHi! 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!
- thisisjedr 4mo ago[dead]
- r0b05 4mo agoExcellent work
- aejm 4mo agoA 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 4mo agoNoted, and thanks for the feedback! It's on our roadmap to better support mobile experience
- 6f17f2dd 4mo agoDo 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 4mo agoThanks 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 https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor/issues/590