Faithfully re-rendering a Word document

[SethCall]

Hi all,

Say I have all the data of a Word document (paragraphs, margins, line
spacing, fonts, etc), and want to recreate the document in a way faithful to
the way Word renders it.

I've been having a hard time doing this from just emprical behavior. There
are alot of corner-cases (and that's putting it mildly). So I wanted to ask,

Does anyone have or know of any resources available (documentation?) that
one could use to interpret a Word document and faithfully reproduce it?

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Reproduce it as what?

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[SethCall]

Hey Doug,

I'm trying to render it as in image, essentially. I want to read in the
contents of a word document (possible via COM and other means), and then
faithfully render it myself, say, as an image on a web page.

I was hoping that OOXML would define not just elements found in a Word
document, but also how to properly render them. It's a HUGE specification
though, and I haven't found anything to that effect.

Anyway, because pagination of a document is so important in how one should
interepret the contents of a Word document, in a perfect world rendering
behaviors would be described in some sort of documentation. But I've been
able to find anything like that.

Regards,
Seth

 

[Graham Mayor]

Rather than re-invent the wheel, download the trial version of SnagIt
www.techsmith.com and use its 'printer' driver to render your document as a
graphic (or series of graphics) in just about any graphics format you care
to choose.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[SethCall]

Hey Graham,

I guess I should indicate a restriction or two I'm working with. The goal
is to not require users to install any client software. Ideally, the user
can just upload the document to a web page.

The other downside of the print technique (like Snagit, or some other
print-to-pdf options) is that it can be difficult, or impossible, to truly
know what each visual element of the printed image or PDF is (as in, what's
sitting at coordinate 50,40? Is it a paragraph, a table? a paragraph within a
table?). That's important to consider with our goal, which is to let users
click indidivual element of the displayed word document and choose actions to
take on that element, and then, the application should be word-savvy enough
to know exactly what they are touching, so that we can automatically make
changes to their document on the server and send back a revised version of
the document.

Thanks for the good suggestion, though.

Seth