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.
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 -
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it works.
We've tested Aspose.Words for .NET 5.1.0 installs and works fine on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64.
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");
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.
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:
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:
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
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
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.
This is an unusual release. Most releases of Aspose.Words for Java are fixes, improvements or new features ported from the Aspose.Words .NET baseline. But this one is Java-only release.
What’s New
Aspose.Words for Java has matured since its first release in January 2006. There is more than one thousand of classes in the project at the moment. Several thousands unit tests help us to maintain the project quality. There are three JDK options supplied to users (so we have to multiply all this by three).
For this release, we have completely reengineered the project structure and testing and release processes to match the new level of project complexity so we can further develop the product.
To download - http://www.aspose.com/Community/files/51/aspose.words/entry115338.aspx
This is a maintenance release with a good number of fixes. Thank you to the customers who reported and waited for their fixes patiently.
To download http://www.aspose.com/Community/Files/51/aspose.words/entry113796.aspx
This guy Pascal (sorry cannot find any more info) has written an interesting series of articles called Implementing conditional logic for Word documents using Aspose.Words.
Basically, this is a feature we get a lot of requests for and he went out and implemented it himself. We are very impressed with the extent of work he has done. Hats off to Pascal.
This is not the first time a customer implements some required feature before we at Aspose get to implement it. An interesting story can be told about HTML export in Aspose.Words, it was also written by a customer before it was available in Aspose.Words.
When customers choose to spend so much time programming with our component, we really appreciate that. It is a very good sign, it means Aspose.Words is getting accepted by the developer community.
From our side, let me assure you we are doing the best we can to please developers - our users. If there is a feature missing - rest assured, it is coming. We just have a bit too many of requests in the pipeline even after 4+ years of work on Aspose.Words.
David Coletta, Buzzwordhttp://www.colettas.org/?p=222
Doug Mahugh, Open XML file formatshttp://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/comments/7672750.aspx
Ryan Ackley, http://www.textmining.org/http://collabowriter.blogspot.com/2007/08/word-file-format-as-career.html
Thanks.
We have published an interesting demo project that you might find useful.
This demo project uses Aspose.Cells for .NET, Aspose.Words for .NET and about 1200 lines of custom code to convert Microsoft Excel workbooks to Microsoft Word documents.
Using this project, you can convert from any load format supported by Aspose.Cells (XLS, OOXML XLSX, SpreadsheetML, CSV and tab delimited) to any save format supported by Aspose.Words (DOC, OOXML DOCX, RTF, WordprocessingML, HTML, PDF).
For more info see the download page http://www.aspose.com/Community/Files/51/aspose.words/entry112559.aspx
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