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.
Moving it out of the build left it with no way in. Settings can only install
from the community catalogue, so a first-party extension that isn't bundled
has a working update channel and no first copy for anyone to update — the
mechanism was all there and the front door was missing.
So it goes back beside screenshot, aegis and pdf-editor: seeded into every
profile by the build, listed under "Built into Theseus", and kept current
between releases by the operator-signed channel at
theseus.x/extensions/docx-editor/. That is the arrangement docs/ADDON-UPDATES.md
describes, and the one the signing script was written for.
About 400 KB compressed in the installer, most of it the vendored editor
libraries — next to the ~4 MB of pdf.js that pdf-editor already ships, the
weight argument for keeping it out didn't survive contact with the numbers.
The end-to-end driver goes back to checking that a fresh profile seeds it,
which is the property that actually matters now.
This is our own extension, so it belongs on the channel the operator key
signs — theseus.x/extensions/docx-editor/ — alongside screenshot, aegis and
pdf-editor. The community catalogue is for extensions published by whoever
owns a BNS name, and routing ours through it would have meant asking a name
owner to vouch for code we wrote.
Drops the community packing script: with one channel there is one publish
path, and it is the one already written down in docs/ADDON-UPDATES.md.
Worth stating plainly, because it is currently true and awkward: Settings
can only *install* from the community catalogue. An extension that is
neither bundled nor catalogued has a working update channel and no way for
anyone to get the first copy. Either it goes back into the build or it needs
a first-party entry point.
Three gaps, one theme: the editor could produce a file but not decide where
it went, what format it was in, or look like anything in the dock.
**Save as…** opens a real file dialog, and the extension typed there picks
the format. Save then writes to that file instead of dropping another copy
in Downloads every time. The renderer never names a path: the dialog returns
an opaque token, and the add-on will only write to a path a dialog actually
returned. An extension page is the least trusted thing in the add-on, and
"write these bytes anywhere" is not a capability it needs.
**PDF** goes through Chromium's own print pipeline in a hidden window — the
same engine as Ctrl+P — on the paper size read out of the document's own
sectPr. For that to match what the user was looking at, the page's
typography had to stop living in editor.css, which the export window can't
reach: it moves to lib/doc-css.js and both surfaces read the one string. The
result embeds subsetted fonts, keeps images, and turns hyperlinks into real
PDF link annotations.
**The icon** is ours. Microsoft's Word mark is a trademark and borrowing it
to look official is not something a browser that talks about sovereignty
should do. icon.svg says "text document" in its own words — a turned corner,
a heading rule, body lines, a pilcrow badge in Silent Mode green — and
`npm run icons` derives the PNGs and addon.json's copy from it, so there is
one drawing rather than several that drift.
Also: the scratch folder follows the profile rename to extensions-data/ via
the api.dataDir the host now provides, instead of creating a stale
addons-data/ beside it.
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.
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.
