Is that what it is using to render and manipulate MS Office documents? That'd explain the poor rendering of some of my files. Bundling all of LibreOffice seems like a pretty huge dependency.
If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.
It uses Office for Windows, so it is Windows only. I don't currently have access to a Mac machine, so I can't build in Mac support yet.
https://github.com/artpar/puppt
it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it
But based on this I thought I could make something similar for cad files, and they turned out to be an entirely different monster. the cad spec is like 1000x bigger than ppts, cad files themselves were hard to gather for test targets. 70-80% of their spec is public and remaining is driven by private vendors. the format itself is in binary. The LLM has been chasing that goal since about 2 months now and its nowhere close.
I generated the skill originally for ChatGPT 5.5, so some of these may not strictly be necessary anymore with later models. But posting here in case others find it useful: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/844386f762c4b3bab49999ba...
What's the alternative library you see?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/getting-start...
I did the exact same thing in my AI system. Spent an ENOURMOUS amount of time trying everything I could and in the end libre was the only thing even somewhat functional.
Easily 2 months of my life lost to these god forsaken systems. APIs and CLIs sound reasonable until you actually attempt anything in this space.
Computer use is exactly the same thing. Go try this: go to a google doc and dev tools check out the dom and now do the same for a word doc. Eye gouging pain of trying to get anything to work.
The goal of bringing in dependencies is so you don't have to duplicate the functionality, in this case, crafted over decades of effort.
[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/SDKGuide/C...
[1] https://poi.apache.org/components/spreadsheet/formula.html