WebODF - Render office documents in a browser | Hacker News Reader

WebODF - Render office documents in a browser

webodf.org

92 pointsbergie12 comments

There should be a prominent link to a live demo on that site.

Edit: Found it: http://webodf.org/demo/ - should be a lot more prominent though, it's linked to in the footer as the "Gallery".

Does this work properly for you? It just says "loading [...]" when I click on any of the documents there.

Works for me in Chrome on Windows 7. I can't click the hyperlink in DanskTest01.odt, though.

While this is cool, i'm surprised by its lack of features : no real editing, the rendering is nowhere near openoffice standards, and the documents just "look different".

Also, did it really take all this while for someone to come up with javascript apis for ODF? Or are there existing tools out there? Surprising that there are no full featured web-based ODF editors even when the standard is completely DOM based and open, and quite old already. How hard is compiling a bunch of XML (what ODF is) to some HTML anyway?

"how hard is compiling a bunch of XML ..." - sorry to pick on you, but "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Being built on XML, which is mostly just a syntax, doesn't really say anything about the semantics of display and editing. It's only slightly removed from saying that it should be easy to compile any programming language into any other because they're all just ASCII text files.

Some parts of the ODF like tables and equations can be very complex to be converted to HTML and even impossible in some cases unless it's displayed as svg or something similar. Handling the image conversions might also be impossible with javascript.

For this to be really useful it has to render existing ODF documents as rendered by OpenOffice.

If there is really a need for perfect rendering of ODF documents, the best approach is probably to compile the relevant part of OpenOffice. Writing a 100% complete ODF implementation from scratch is very hard.

I wasn't aware that OpenOffice is the gold standard w.r.t. ODF rendering, or even that having such a standard makes sense. I would think that, if you want to ensure your document renders the same everywhere, the right approach is to create a .pdf or .png document.

Yet another reason why people should be leaving behind Microsoft's .doc(x) formats!

Haha, did you just see that in the lightning talk at the Berlin Desktop Summit?

shudder

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