feat(docx-editor): edit Word documents without quietly eating what Word put in them
A .docx editor is easy to write badly: read the file into HTML, let someone
edit it, write a fresh document back, and hand them a file that lost its
headers, its page size and half its formatting without ever saying so.
Three things keep this one honest.
The reader doesn't use mammoth's HTML. mammoth's converter is deliberately
semantic, and HTML has nowhere to put a run's colour or a paragraph's line
spacing, so it drops them — and those are controls this editor puts in the
ribbon. Taking its parsed document model instead means what the ribbon offers
is what the file can actually carry. Six properties mammoth's model didn't
keep are added by build-time patches, each asserting its anchor so an upgrade
that moves the code fails the build rather than shipping a lossy reader.
The writer rebuilds the body but carries the rest of the package across:
headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, the document's own style catalogue,
its theme and its page setup, with relationship ids and content types
re-wired. Word features the editor can't model are still lost, so they are
detected when the file opens and named in a banner before anyone edits.
Tracked changes get their own gate. mammoth renders insertions as ordinary
text and drops deletions, so saving would accept every pending revision
without Word ever asking. Such a document opens read-only until the user
says that is what they want.
Verified over 66 real documents: 65 round-trip with an identical model and a
structurally valid package, the one exception being a 7 MB WMF picture, which
no browser can display and the writer cannot emit. Also driven end to end
through a real Theseus over CDP — sidebar, ribbon, typing, save, reopen.
2026-09-20 20:46:29 +02:00
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{
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"name": "docx-editor-vendor-build",
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"private": true,
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"version": "0.0.0",
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2026-09-21 22:47:13 +02:00
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"description": "Build-time only: bundles mammoth + ProseMirror + docx into bundled-addons/docx-editor/vendor/, and rasterises the icon.",
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feat(docx-editor): edit Word documents without quietly eating what Word put in them
A .docx editor is easy to write badly: read the file into HTML, let someone
edit it, write a fresh document back, and hand them a file that lost its
headers, its page size and half its formatting without ever saying so.
Three things keep this one honest.
The reader doesn't use mammoth's HTML. mammoth's converter is deliberately
semantic, and HTML has nowhere to put a run's colour or a paragraph's line
spacing, so it drops them — and those are controls this editor puts in the
ribbon. Taking its parsed document model instead means what the ribbon offers
is what the file can actually carry. Six properties mammoth's model didn't
keep are added by build-time patches, each asserting its anchor so an upgrade
that moves the code fails the build rather than shipping a lossy reader.
The writer rebuilds the body but carries the rest of the package across:
headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, the document's own style catalogue,
its theme and its page setup, with relationship ids and content types
re-wired. Word features the editor can't model are still lost, so they are
detected when the file opens and named in a banner before anyone edits.
Tracked changes get their own gate. mammoth renders insertions as ordinary
text and drops deletions, so saving would accept every pending revision
without Word ever asking. Such a document opens read-only until the user
says that is what they want.
Verified over 66 real documents: 65 round-trip with an identical model and a
structurally valid package, the one exception being a 7 MB WMF picture, which
no browser can display and the writer cannot emit. Also driven end to end
through a real Theseus over CDP — sidebar, ribbon, typing, save, reopen.
2026-09-20 20:46:29 +02:00
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"type": "module",
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"scripts": {
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refactor(docx-editor): ship it as a community extension, not part of the browser
A .docx editor is a megabyte of vendored library. Bundling it would charge
that to everyone who wanted a browser, including the people who will never
open a Word document in it.
So it leaves the build: out of bundled-addons/, out of extraResources, absent
from a fresh profile. It arrives the way anyone else's extension does —
Settings › Extensions › Community, from the catalogue the gateway builds, and
listed on theseus.x/extensions alongside everything else published there.
That also means it is signed by the owner of a BNS name rather than by the
operator key, which is the right trust story for something that isn't part of
the browser.
`npm run pack` produces the tarball the publish page takes; the signature
needs the publisher name's wallet, so it isn't something the repo can do.
The end-to-end test now installs the extension into a throwaway profile the
way the community installer would, and asserts up front that a fresh profile
doesn't already have it — the bundling is what was being removed, so it is
worth a test that would notice it coming back.
2026-09-21 01:06:58 +02:00
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"build": "node build.mjs",
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feat(docx-editor): the page fills the window, and two fonts ship with it
The page sat marooned in the middle of a wide window with dark space either
side of it. It is now drawn at the size the document actually claims — A4
stays A4, margins come from its own sectPr — and CSS `zoom` scales that to
fit, defaulting to Fit width with a control in the footer and Ctrl +/-/0.
Scaling rather than widening is deliberate. A page stretched to the window
would break every line somewhere different from where the printed page
breaks it, and an editor whose whole claim is that it shows you the document
should not lie about where the lines end. `zoom` also beats a transform
here: it affects layout, so the board scrolls correctly and ProseMirror's
coordinate maths keeps working.
Ubuntu and Fraunces now ship in fonts/, because Windows has neither and a
font offered in the ribbon that the machine lacks is a font the user picks
and then cannot see. Fetched once by `npm run fonts` and committed, never at
runtime: an extension in a browser built around not phoning home should not
ask a font CDN what a document looks like every time one is opened.
Two things had to be worked around. On file:// Chromium registers @font-face
rules and then refuses to fetch the files — the family appears in
document.fonts and every glyph still renders in the fallback — so the add-on
reads the woff2 and hands the page a stylesheet with them inlined as data
URLs. The PDF export needed the same treatment for a different reason: its
print window runs from a temp folder, where a relative url() resolves to
nothing, which would have quietly undone the one-stylesheet-for-both promise
that lib/doc-css.js exists to keep. If either path fails, the ribbon labels
those families "(not available)" rather than implying otherwise.
About 700 KB, most of it Ubuntu's Cyrillic and Greek — kept because the
documents this is used on are not all English. Licences ship alongside.
2026-09-22 19:12:56 +02:00
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"icons": "node make-icons.mjs",
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"fonts": "node fetch-fonts.mjs"
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feat(docx-editor): edit Word documents without quietly eating what Word put in them
A .docx editor is easy to write badly: read the file into HTML, let someone
edit it, write a fresh document back, and hand them a file that lost its
headers, its page size and half its formatting without ever saying so.
Three things keep this one honest.
The reader doesn't use mammoth's HTML. mammoth's converter is deliberately
semantic, and HTML has nowhere to put a run's colour or a paragraph's line
spacing, so it drops them — and those are controls this editor puts in the
ribbon. Taking its parsed document model instead means what the ribbon offers
is what the file can actually carry. Six properties mammoth's model didn't
keep are added by build-time patches, each asserting its anchor so an upgrade
that moves the code fails the build rather than shipping a lossy reader.
The writer rebuilds the body but carries the rest of the package across:
headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, the document's own style catalogue,
its theme and its page setup, with relationship ids and content types
re-wired. Word features the editor can't model are still lost, so they are
detected when the file opens and named in a banner before anyone edits.
Tracked changes get their own gate. mammoth renders insertions as ordinary
text and drops deletions, so saving would accept every pending revision
without Word ever asking. Such a document opens read-only until the user
says that is what they want.
Verified over 66 real documents: 65 round-trip with an identical model and a
structurally valid package, the one exception being a 7 MB WMF picture, which
no browser can display and the writer cannot emit. Also driven end to end
through a real Theseus over CDP — sidebar, ribbon, typing, save, reopen.
2026-09-20 20:46:29 +02:00
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},
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"devDependencies": {
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"docx": "^9.5.1",
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"esbuild": "^0.28.2",
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"jsdom": "^29.1.1",
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"jszip": "^3.10.1",
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"mammoth": "^1.12.3",
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"prosemirror-commands": "^1.7.1",
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"prosemirror-dropcursor": "^1.8.2",
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"prosemirror-gapcursor": "^1.3.2",
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"prosemirror-history": "^1.4.1",
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"prosemirror-inputrules": "^1.5.0",
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"prosemirror-keymap": "^1.2.3",
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"prosemirror-model": "^1.25.0",
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"prosemirror-schema-basic": "^1.2.4",
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"prosemirror-schema-list": "^1.5.1",
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"prosemirror-state": "^1.4.3",
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"prosemirror-tables": "^1.7.1",
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"prosemirror-view": "^1.40.0"
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}
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}
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