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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T07:42:41+00:00

I’m designing a web application where a large portion of the site will be

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I’m designing a web application where a large portion of the site will be displaying user-generated documents. Now, I’ve already implemented LaTeX source code and pdf rendering on the website, but I am still can’t render Microsoft Word files (.doc and .docx) on the site. I’ve looked around and found a similar question (here), but it was never answered. I’m wondering whether or not using a web-based solution like Google Docs or doing it programatically on the server with OpenOffice are viable solutions. A pure JavaScript solution would be ideal though.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Based on Vikram’s answer, you could use Google Docs Viewer in order to render the files. This way it should work on all browsers.

    Instead of 

    <a href="doc1.doc" target="awindow">Doc 1</a>

    use 

    <a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=[URLToDoc1.doc]" target="awindow">Doc 1</a>

    But you have to urlencode the URL. For example,

    http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf

    becomes

    http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.google.com%2Farchive%2Fbigtable-osdi06.pdf

    You can go to https://docs.google.com/viewer in order to generate the links easily.

    Moreover, Vikram’s code is old and ugly. You should use something like:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Open Doc</title>
<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/
.clear{clear:both;}
#list{float:left;margin-right:50px;}
#wrapper{overflow:hidden;}
#awindow{width:100%;height:440px;}
/*]]>*/
</style>
</head>
<body>
<ul id="list">
    <li><a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=[URLToDoc1.doc]" target="awindow">Doc 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=[URLToDoc2.docx]" target="awindow">Doc 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=[URLToDoc3.doc]" target="awindow">Doc 3</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="wrapper">
  <iframe id="awindow" name="awindow" src="title.html"></iframe>
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>
</body>
</html>
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