I’m writing in response to your post that was made in April 2004, with respect to building the Aspose.Word.Web product.
Does Aspose currently have plans to build this functionality?
The ability to view and edit Word documents in the browser is something that my company is looking to provide in our enterprise software packages. We are currently evaluating the Aspose.Word library and are extremely impressed with what we can do thus far. (We are building ASP.NET applications using VS.NET.
Any information you could provide would be most appreciated.
PS : We have also evaluated the integration of Aspose.TextBox.Web with the Word library … but it doesn’t suit our requirements.
Regards
Jason Barr.
Solutions Architect.
Plantech Consulting Group Pty Ltd.
The question of editing Word files in an ASP.NET application is indeed an interesting one and I think it is mainly a question of technology.
We’ve experimented with integrating Aspose.Textbox.Web and Aspose.Word but this did not create a good editor. Aspose.Textbox.Web as well as most of the other HTML editing controls are based on DHTML and the editor control that is built into the browser. Such a control is easy for vendors to create (they only need to add some toolbars and some commands in form of client scripts) and it is a good editing control to edit a single piece of text with formatting, but this control is far from meeting the “edit Word files” requirement. You cannot see or edit many Word features sections, page setup, fields, shapes, columns etc etc, too many to mention. So we are not pursuing this approach in our development plans anymore. There will be a demo that shows how Aspose.Word can be integrated with any HTML editing control via Aspose.Word’s HTML import and export achieving “very simple editing of Word files”, but that’s it.
Another approach would be to create a fully functional editor control and make it downloadable into the client browser as an ActiveX control. This will take some time and require some security permissions from the client side, but it will be able to achieve something of a better editor. But developing a text editing control that even remotely matches MS Word editor is somewhat similar to developing MS Word itself and it would be a bit far fetched for Aspose to attempt develop something like MS Word.
So at the moment there are no immediate plans for Aspose to make an editor or a web editor control for Word files, but who knows what might happen in the future.