Can you do complex editing of Word Documents in a browser?

Question

A friend of mine wants to have an application where people can upload documents in Word (or text) format, and then allow people to make edits to those documents within a browser.

Is there any mechanism that would support adding text "bubbles" for adding comments? Either floating, or off to the side.

Being able to save back to Word format is a must too. Or at least, some format supported by Word, that would still be editable. Saving it as an image is not acceptable.

I was thinking about opening the Word Document in an FCK Editor window, but FCK only seems to have "normal" inline text editing capabilities (although it is great).

Is this feasible?

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

It is possible. For example eyeOS has a text processing application able to open and process Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org text documents.

Answer 3

Why are you trying to compete with google docs?

I know that TinyMCE provides some rich controls for in browser editing. Last time i looked at it, it had 100% of the stuff i would normally use in word, and then some. On the other hand, i probably has 1% of the features that MS word provides. It would be VERY difficult to implement it all.

As far as saving to MS word compatible format. i am sure its possible. it would probably be easier to save to a non-doc format. As far as popups etc, those can be easy built using jquery UI or any other javascript framework.

Bottom line: yes, its possible, but why?!

Answer 4

I was thinking about opening the Word Document in an FCK Editor window, but FCK only seems to have "normal" inline text editing capabilities (although it is great).

FCK Editor won't get you anywhere, since it was designed for a different purpose (inline WYSYWIG HTML editing).

Is this feasible?

"Feasible" depends on many things: time, resources, engineering skills, etc.

Even third party desktop applications that are maintained for years, such as Open Office or Pages.app do not provide 100% of the functionality that Word provides. Part of this is because the .doc format is neither really well documented nor easy to implement.

For a look at the state of the art of what you can do with Word files in a browser, check the Google Docs application.

I don't believe you can go from asking such basic a question on Stack Overflow to a decent implementation of in-browser Word editing in a realistic timeframe.

Answer 5

Yes it is feasible. Google has done that (and it does have comments). So has Adobe. I'm sure there is more.

Answer 6

Xopus provides a programmable platform that allows you to define editable XML within a WYSIWYG environment. You could use it to define what you want to edit (XML), against which rules you want to edit it (an XSD) and how you want it to look while you edit it (XSL). Then you tie that all together with the Javascript API.

In other words, you could pretty easily define a document that contains multiple paragraphs with optional comments and then have them displayed as bubbles exactly the way you want them; when saved, a script on the server could be executed that converts the XML to a Word document.

Take a look at the demos.

Answer 7

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

This means that there is no lossy conversion on either the way in or the way out. So for example, when you save after editing, anything which was in the original docx is round tripped back to Word.

As far as support for older .doc is concerned, POI can be used to convert them to .docx (although your mileage may vary).