face08 / html-docx-js

Converts HTML documents to DOCX in the browser

html-docx-js

This is a very small library that is capable of converting HTML documents to DOCX format that is used by Microsoft Word 2007 and onward. It manages to perform the conversion in the browser by using a feature called 'altchunks'. In a nutshell, it allows embedding content in a different markup language. We are using MHT document to ship the embedded content to Word as it allows to handle images. After Word opens such file, it converts the external content to Word Processing ML (this is how the markup language of DOCX files is called) and replaces the reference.

Altchunks were not supported by Microsoft Word for Mac 2008 and are not supported by LibreOffice and Google Docs.

Compatibility

This library should work on any modern browser that supports Blobs (either natively or via Blob.js). It was tested on Google Chrome 36, Safari 7 and Internet Explorer 10.

It also works on Node.js (tested on v0.10.12) using Buffer instead of Blob.

Images Support

This library supports only inlined base64 images (sourced via DATA URI). But it is easy to convert a regular image (sourced from static folder) on the fly. If you need an example of such conversion you can checkout a demo page source (see function convertImagesToBase64).

Usage and demo

Very minimal demo is available as test/sample.html in the repository and online. Please note that saving files on Safari is a little bit convoluted and the only reliable method seems to be falling back to a Flash-based approach (such as Downloadify). Our demo does not include this workaround to keep things simple, so it will not work on Safari at this point of time.

You can also find a sample for using it in Node.js environment here.

To generate DOCX, simply pass a HTML document (as string) to asBlob method to receive Blob (or Buffer) containing the output file.

var converted = htmlDocx.asBlob(content);
saveAs(converted, 'test.docx');

asBlob can take additional options for controlling page setup for the document:

• orientation: landscape or portrait (default)
• margins: map of margin sizes (expressed in twentieths of point, see WordprocessingML documentation for details):
  • top: number (default: 1440, i.e. 2.54 cm)
  • right: number (default: 1440)
  • bottom: number (default: 1440)
  • left: number (default: 1440)
  • header: number (default: 720)
  • footer: number (default: 720)
  • gutter: number (default: 0)

For example:

var converted = htmlDocx.asBlob(content, {orientation: 'landscape', margins: {top: 720}});
saveAs(converted, 'test.docx');

IMPORTANT: please pass a complete, valid HTML (including DOCTYPE, html and body tags). This may be less convenient, but gives you possibility of including CSS rules in style tags.

html-docx-js is distributed as 'standalone' Browserify module (UMD). You can require it as html-docx. If no module loader is available, it will register itself as window.htmlDocx. See test/sample.html for details.

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Evidence Prime, Inc. See the LICENSE file for license rights and limitations (MIT).