Can you perform complex editing of Word documents in a browser?

Question

My friend wants to have an application in which people can upload documents in Word (or text) format, and then allow people to make changes to these documents in a browser.

Is there any mechanism that supports adding text bubbles to add comments? Either floating or off to the side.

The ability to save back to Word format is also required. Or at least some format supported by Word, which will still be editable. Saving it as an image is unacceptable.

I thought about opening the Word Document in the FCK editor window, but FCK only has the "normal" inline text editing capabilities (although this is great).

Is it possible?

Answer 1

Yes it is possible. Google has done this (and it has comments). So what is Adobe . I am sure there are more of them.

Answer 2

Xopus provides a programmable platform that allows you to define editable XML in a WYSIWYG environment. You can use it to determine what you want to edit (XML), with which you want to edit it (XSD) and how you want it to look during editing (XSL). Then you link everything together with the Javascript API .

In other words, you can easily define a document containing several paragraphs with optional comments, and then display them as bubbles exactly the way you want; when saved, a script can be executed on the server, which converts the XML into a Word document.

Take a look at demos .

Answer 3

If these are Word 2007 documents, you can use Silverlight . Here is an example application that uses Silverlight to open a Word 2007 document and display it in a browser.

Since StackOverflow is a programmer site, I assume you are a programmer. You can use Silverlight to add bubbles and annotations to a Word 2007 document, but you need to know VB.NET or C #.

Answer 4

Take a look at docx2web.appspot.com, which (currently) is a very bare bone editor with a distinguishing feature that the browser directly manipulates the (more or less) "flat OPC" version of docx.

This means that lossless conversion does not occur either along the path or along the path. So, for example, when you save after editing, everything that was in the original docx is rounded to Word.

Regarding support for the old .doc, POIs can be used to convert them to .docx (although your mileage may vary).

Answer 5

Why are you trying to compete with google docs?

I know that TinyMCE provides some advanced controls for editing in the browser. The last time I looked at him, he had 100% of the material that I would normally use in a word, and then in another. On the other hand, I probably have 1% of the possibilities provided by MS word. It would be very difficult to implement all this.

As for saving in MS Word format compatible. I am sure it is possible. it would probably be easier to save in a format other than doc. As for pop-ups, etc., they can be easily created using jQuery UI or any other javascript infrastructure.

Bottom line: yes, maybe, but why ?!

Answer 6

It is possible. For example, eyeOS has a word processing application that can open and process Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org text documents.