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?

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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.

Solution 3

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#.

Solution 4

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).

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Comments

[John B]

Sorry I was harsh. So basically the 2007 Open XML format provides capabilities for editing, but there isn't anything yet that can do what I'm asking.

[John B]

I don't necessarily need everything, maybe just some commenting tools.

[John B]

FYI, I'm not trying to compete with Google Docs, I'm just trying to get a specific set of features for a specific internal application.

[John B]

Google Docs looks like it supports inline comments, but not "floating" comments.

[John B]

Maybe I'm just being picky, but the comments in Google Docs are not what I was asking for. They are only inline, and while they're better than nothing, they're not what I need.

[vartec]

Yeah, I think I know what kind of comments you want. Sorry, haven't seen any AJAX word processor with bubble style comments.

[Laurens]

And version 4.0 will have change tracking capabilities similar to Word.

[Nick Retallack]

Are you sure this really helps to display word documents in a web browser?

[vartec]

@NickRetallack: it was link to Adobe Buzzword, apparently it has been discontinued. help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat.com/Using/…

[Lluis Martinez]

eyeOS sucked and disappeared a long time ago