Aspose.Words

How to get content of a node or bookmark as HTML, WordML, RTF?

2008-07-03T23:47:00Z

How to get content of a node or bookmark as HTML, WordML, RTF?

Many customers of Aspose.Words ask this question, but so far there was no simple one-line-of-code way of doing that in Aspose.Words.

The general solution we recommended so far was to "extract" the document fragment you are interested in into a separate Document object and then use Document.Save to save it in the desired format. Extracting the fragment might be done either by deleting all content from the document except the fragment you are interested in, or by copying the fragment into an empty Document instance. Because the Document is a tree of nodes, extracting a fragment is not always straightforward and requires a bit of coding with traversing nodes.

We would like to change that and make it easy for you. The reason we have not yet done this is "complex consequences" that are not immediately apparent to the users who ask for this feature, but are very apparent to us when we try to think of implementing this feature.

This post is to let you, the user who asks for this feature see the "consequences" of this feature and seek your feedback. Once we decide how to proceed, we will quickly implement extracting HTML, WordML, RTF and any other format from nodes, bookmarks and any other document fragments.

Where Should the Images Go?

You want to obtain contents of a node or bookmark as an HTML string. All you want to do is:

string htmlString = doc.Range.Bookmarks["MyBookmark"].ToHtml();

It is often forgotten that the fragment could contain images. When a complete document is saved to HTML, the images are written as separate files and the output HTML file references them.

However, what to do with images when extracting only a fragment of a document as HTML? Should we just ignore the images in this case?

What's an RTF Fragment?

It is easy to say "I want RTF of that paragraph", but the problem is that any RTF fragment (or WordML or OOXML for that matter) is only valid within the context of a particular document.

There are several document-wide structures that every fragment will often refer to. For example, an RTF fragment will use \f0 etc keywords to refer to entries in the font table. That is if you don't carry an RTF font table along with that RTF paragraph then the "references" to fonts will be dangling and you will never find out what font is used by text of the RTF fragment.

This situation is not limited to fonts and RTF, it is much more widespread. Other document-wide structures that are often referenced are styles and list (numbering) and this affects not only RTF, but WordML and OOXML.

In WordML there is a thing called "context free chunk" that could be used to solve the problem. A context free chunk is basically a "mini document" that includes all the document-wide-structures that are referenced by that particular document fragment. Brian Jones gives a bit of info about context free chunks here http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/07/20/441167.aspx

What do you think if we make Node.ToWordML() to return XML in the context free chunk format? I am not so sure about RTF and OOXML though. For RTF we will probably have to return a complete "mini document". For OOXML... no ideas so far.

Jagged Fragments

A bookmark in a Word document can start in a paragraph outside of a table, but end inside a table. The document is a tree of nodes and the situation looks something like this:

If you want to get content of MyBookmark as HTML or WordML you are looking at several "jagged" nodes. That is start of table, row and cell elements are inside the bookmark, but they end outside of it. How do you want that exported?

A possible solution is to "snap" up or down until the jagged fragment is closed. It could be possible to snap so the whole table is included in the bookmark or excluded. What do you think?

Eating one's own dog food again!

2008-06-21T09:44:00Z

Aspose.Words for .NET is the dog food again and we are eating it in our new product Aspose.Recognition for .NET.

Aspose.Recognition is a fresh new product from Aspose and it is touted to later grow into a powerful "fixed-layout" to "flow-layout" document converter. At the moment it is only a 1.0 BETA and can convert PDF to all output formats supported by Aspose.Words for .NET such as DOC, OOXML, RTF, ODT and HTML. Future features planned are OCR document recognition and output to more document formats.

When you download and use Aspose.Recognition, no other software is necessary. Downloading Aspose.Words separately is not needed because in this version Aspose.Recognition embeds a document generation engine of Aspose.Words (although this might later change if more Office output formats are supported with help of other Aspose components).

Other places where Aspose.Words is used at Aspose:

Aspose.Editor for .NET to open and save documents.
Aspose.Words for Reporting Services to generate reports.
Aspose.Words for JasperReports (coming soon).
Generation of Aspose Documentation pages.

If you need PDF to word processing documents conversion in your project, give Aspose.Recognition a try and share your experience with us in the support forums. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Aspose.Words Documentation Updated with Java Examples

2008-06-09T12:04:00Z

I am happy to announce that Aspose.Words Documentation was updated. It now includes all code examples in three languages: C#, VB.NET and Java!

The Getting Started and Programmer's Guide sections were updated. They contain over 100 code examples. See http://www.aspose.com/documentation/file-format-components/aspose.words-for-.net-and-java/the-mergeimagefield-event.html for an example.

The Aspose.Words API Reference had all examples in C#, VB.NET and Java already.

Aspose.Words.Java.2.4.2 Released

2008-05-26T14:56:00Z

Only one fix included by urgent request:

Issue ID	Component	Summary
4925	Doc	“Unrecognized format of the form field” Exception occurs during opening document.

To download:

http://www.aspose.com/community/files/51/file-format-components/aspose.words/entry128647.aspx

Aspose.Words for .NET 5.2.0 Released

2008-05-15T06:02:00Z

I am happy to announce release of Aspose.Words for .NET 5.2.0 that is now available for download.

New Feature: Save as MHTML

We have added a new useful feature: save as MHTML. MHTML is a "web archive" or "single file web page" format. An HTML document and all external resources (images and stylesheets) are stored within a single file. MHTML could be a good option if you need to convert documents to HTML. When saving documents as HTML, Aspose.Words saves images into separate files and it could be cumbersome to deal with them.

Saving into a single MHTML file allows, for example, to easily email the document. We will soon upload a sample that does just that: uses Aspose.Words + Aspose.Network to mail merge into Word documents and email as HTML.

New Feature: Save as OpenDocument Text (ODT)

Finally, we are proud to announce the availability of the long awaited OpenDocument support. It is hard to convert Word documents into OpenDocument, but we've done it.

This release also includes big number of fixes in many areas. As always, it is a good idea to stay up to date with the latest version of Aspose.Words.

You can see and try new functionality in the online demo.

Aspose.Words - the engine of choice for online word processors?

2008-05-01T22:09:00Z

There is a number of great products already out there built by great companies and great people that incorporate Aspose.Words for their document processing needs. But I find it especially rewarding when Aspose.Words is used to build a word processing application, especially an online word processor!

We've mentioned earlier and got mentioned that the Buzzword team chose Aspose.Words for .NET to use as an engine for loading and saving documents in various formats. We keep working hard to make sure they are happy with Aspose.Words. Our upcoming release will include OpenDocument format (ODF) export that we've promised to Buzzword.

This trend seems to continue and we were happy to learn that Zoho Writer uses Aspose.Words for Java for loading and saving to some of the document formats they support.

Thank you all for your continuous interest and trust in Aspose.Words.

Aspose.Words for Reporting Services 2.2.0.0 Released

2008-04-28T08:14:00Z

Please welcome another release of our popular product - Aspose.Words for Reporting Services 2.2.0.0. We've decided to skip a bunch of maintenance releases such as 2.1.X.X mainly because of a couple of new export formats implemented -

Hypertext markup language (HTML)
Plain text (TXT)

We could have added these formats much earlier (since the product is built on the top of Aspose.Words which supports both), but we were not quite sure the users really needed them. But we've recently figured out they did! Moreover, we've made some improvements to the TXT export format, so that tables now preserve their layout when exported to plain text.

You can also notice a number of other improvements and fixes that are listed on the download page of the product:

http://www.aspose.com/community/files/52/ssrs-rendering-extensions/aspose.words.reporting.services/default.aspx

As ever, we keep working hard on the product as it becomes widely used indeed and more and more customers visit our support forum to post their inquiries. Please don't hesitate to do so and we'll be as responsive as always!

Aspose Document Converters for SharePoint Server 2007

2008-04-11T12:56:00Z

This is a brief update for an article I wrote about a year ago on how to create Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 DOC to PDF (and other) document converters using Aspose components.

A Bit of History

We have published the article initially at CodeProject in the SharePoint section. The article was actually quite popular and received lots of hits. However, after a few months it was deleted by CodeProject. The reason given for deletion was "the article promotes a commercial product". Haha, they must have been joking... What about all other thousands of articles on CodeProject that promote Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office, Telerik and heaps of other commercial products. As far as I am concerned the article was perfect - it was a programming project with free source code.

Interestingly, the article is actually still accessible at CodeProject here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/DOC2PDF_in_MOSS.aspx and it ranks quite high in Google.

Of course the article is still available in the Aspose.Words Documentation.

What's New

Aspose.Words now supports Office Open XML (OOXML) load and save as well as OpenDocument (ODT) save. This means that you can actually add quite a lot of conversions to SharePoint. In fact, from any Aspose.Words load format to any save format:

DOC2RTF
DOC2WordML
DOC2DOCX
DOC2PDF
DOC2HTML
DOC2TXT
DOC2ODT

RTF2DOC
RTF2WordML
RTF2DOCX
RTF2PDF
RTF2HTML
RTF2ODT
RTF2TXT

DOCX2DOC
DOCX2WordML
DOCX2RTF
DOCX2PDF
DOCX2HTML
DOCX2ODT
DOCX2TXT

WordML2DOC
WordML2DOCX
WordML2RTF
WordML2PDF
WordML2HTML
WordML2ODT
WordML2TXT

If you need one of those converters in MOSS it must be a good time to try now. Don't forget Aspose has other file format components for spreadsheets and presentations so you could use them for even more conversions.

If You Have Problems

There were many people who followed the steps in the article and it worked. Some encountered problems and reported to us in the Aspose Support Forums.

So far we've taken a stance of blaiming SharePoint's overly complex procedure for adding and configuring document converters (you can see that from the article) and essentially refusing to provide technical support for SharePoint.

We are now considering what can be done to improve the situation. You could help by leaving a comment here or in the forums about the issue. Do you want a document converter for MOSS to be a ready installable product so you don't have to tweak config files? What conversions do you actually need? And so on.

OOXML: Don't Repeat Yourself 30 Times!

2008-04-04T16:06:00Z

It struck me from the first day I saw the OOXML specification how "strange" it is. You know borders in MS Word. I mean those text, paragraph and table borders. Complete specfication for a border takes 6 pages in OOXML. I'd say it is a bit too much for such a simple thing as a border, but that's okay, I guess the more detailed the spec the better.

The problem is that this 6 pages border specification is repeated in the OOXML document 30 times. Yes, for every left, right, bottom and top border and every type of object you get those 6 pages again and again.

As you know any decent programming book will tell you "don't repeat yourself" and "duplication is bad".

To me it looks like defining a simple base data type such as integer and repeating its full specification in every place in the documentation it gets used. I am completely lost at why this is the way things done in OOXML and borders is not the only thing that is duplicated.

By removing such basic duplication the OOXML spec could have been made a lot shorter. Just removing borders duplication could have made it almost 200 pages shorter.

It will be very interesting to see how OOXML spec turns out when it is final and published by ISO. I cannot find any info on this and my gut feel is that the duplication will remain and that will make it a very sad standard.

Here is more on DRY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself.

On the bright side, the more complex the standard - the better for component vendors such as Aspose!

You've got to be kidding trying to work with OOXML documents without a decent class library such as Aspose.Words. It took us a year to support OOXML to a reasonable level of conformance (with all MS Word formats experience we had before) and we are still working on it.

DOC, RTF and OOXML export from Microsoft Report Viewer control?

2008-03-28T09:26:00Z

Found an interesting article http://www.codeproject.com/KB/reporting-services/report-viewer-hack.aspx. This guy is clearly a big fan of Aspose.Words for Reporting Services.

Aspose.Words for .NET on Windows Server 2008

2008-03-28T09:20:00Z

Yes, it works.

We've tested Aspose.Words for .NET 5.1.0 installs and works fine on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64.

Aspose.Words 5.1.0 Released

2008-03-27T11:45:00Z

There is Aspsoe.Words 5.1.0 available in downloads http://www.aspose.com/community/files/51/file-format-components/aspose.words/entry119442.aspx.

Here I just wanted to elaborate more on what we've done:

Improvements to DrawingML Import (in OOXML)

When we started implementation of Office Open XML export and import features in Aspose.Words about a year ago, Microsoft Word 2007 was storing images and shapes in the VML format inside a DOCX document. All information we could find at that time was saying that DrawingML although part of the Office Open XML specification is only used by Power Point in Office 2007. Apparently we were mistaken.

Now after a year of hard work we have a good level of support (as you can see from our conformance spreadsheet) for OOXML import and export since Aspose.Words 5.0.0. But sometime during this year Microsoft Word 2007 "started" to store images and shapes in the DrawingML format and that took us by surprise. We completely missed out on DrawingML and hence many customers reported images missing in their documents after DOCX open/save in Aspose.Words.

When you save a document in Word 2007 you can control whether VML or DrawingML is used by checking the "Maintain compatibility with Word 97-2003" in the Save As dialog box. If a document was saved with this option turned off, all images in the document will be stored as DrawingML.

Straight after 5.0 release we started urgently working on DrawingML support. This 5.1 release is a first iteration. Import of inline images stored as DrawingML is now supported.

Improvements to ODT (OpenDocument) Export

This is another iteration of features in ODT export. Export of formatting for images, paragraphs, text, sections and tables has been improved in many places. We still continue to actively work on ODT.

Exporting CSS to a Stylesheet

A useful new option that was requested by many customer allows to export CSS to a stylesheet (embedded or external file) when exporting a document to HTML.


Document doc = new Document("MyFile.doc");
doc.SaveOptions.HtmlExportCssStyleSheetType = CssStyleSheetType.External;
doc.SaveOptions.HtmlExportCssStyleSheetFileName = "myfile_styles.css";
doc.Save("MyFile.html");

Resolved Problems on 64bit Windows

We've been plagued by occasional customer reports about Aspose.Words failures on Windows Server 2003 64-bit over a period of several months.

The problem was traced down to a setting in the obfuscation tool we use. Some Aspose.Words builds would run on 64-bit successfully, but some will fail, mostly when you attempt to open a document with a memory access exception. The difficulty was that some builds will work and some not.

We hope that we have finally resolved this issue now.

Aspose.Words with Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5

2008-03-25T05:00:00Z

Yes, it works.

We will continue to ship two assemblies: bin\net1.1\Aspose.Words.dll and bin\net2.0\Aspose.Words.dll built for .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 respectively.

bin\net2.0\Aspose.Words.dll is to be used with:

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
.NET Framework 2.0 (with or without SP1)
.NET Framework 3.0 (with or without SP1)
.NET Framework 3.5
x86 or x64 application

bin\net2.0\Aspose.Words.dll will continue to target .NET Framework 2.0 because it does not use any .NET 3.0 or 3.5 features. A good MSDN article .NET Framework 3.5 Archiecture has more info about this.

bin\net1.1\Aspose.Words.dll is to be used with:

Visual Studio 2003
Visual Studio 2002
.NET Framework 1.1 (with or without SP)
.NET Framework 1.0 (you need to create a configuration file as shown in the Aspose.Words documentation)

Aspose.Words for Reporting Services 2.1.0.0 Released

2008-03-12T16:10:00Z

It's been around a year since we released the first version of Aspose.Words for Reporting Services, and now 2.1 is coming. A rendering extension is not a standalone program, it's rather somewhat like a plug-in, and the goals of a plug-in are to

be as easy to install, configure and maintain as possible
do its job as good as possible.

We truly hope we've achieved these goals. However, we keep working hard on the product in order to make it even closer to perfection. There are always lots of things to investigate and implement, especially in the area of format conversion.

The new release is available to download at http://www.aspose.com/community/files/52/ssrs-rendering-extensions/aspose.words.reporting.services/default.aspx

Aspose.Words with AJAX Demo

2008-03-05T00:29:00Z

Here is a great little demo that shows how to invoke Aspose.Words from an ASP.NET application AJAX style. For more info http://www.aspose.com/community/files/51/aspose.words/entry116156.aspx

Aspose.Words for .NET by itself is just a .NET class library for document conversions, report generation and document programmatic access and as such does not have (and does not need) any built-in web or other fancy stuff. Therefore it is very easy to use from any .NET application be it an AJAX, ASP.NET, Windows Forms etc.