Open-source office project previews everything from doc to ofd—this used to be big-company work

openworkbuddy can now preview doc, docx, ppt, pptx, xls, xlsx, pdf, ofd, and ceb.

With the format list laid out, the first few are nothing unusual; the last two are the point. ofd is China's domestic fixed-layout document standard, and ceb is Founder's format. Among everyday tools, support for these two basically appears only in government and state-owned enterprise procurement lists. Ordinary users don't encounter them, and developers aren't very willing to touch them either.

Developer Uncle Cat said in a tweet that friends working within the system are in luck. It's half a joke, but the scenario it points to is very real: in a single organization, doc, pdf, and ofd circulate at the same time, yet preview tools each handle only their own formats—just installing the software is troublesome enough.

Project address: https://github.com/CatCatUncle/openworkbuddy

Beyond the features, there's a detail more worth noticing. In a reply, Uncle Cat said three months of iteration was enough to match several years of work at a big company. That's partly boasting, but the pace of an open-source project really is different from a big company: requirements come directly from users, and releases go out as soon as they're done—no scheduling needed.

A netizen replied below, 'There are more and more features,' and someone else said, 'This is great.' There wasn't much promotional language; the discussion centered on the features themselves.

Previewing multiple formats sounds like grunt work, and it is. Behind every format is a pile of pitfalls in parsing, rendering, fonts, and layout. There are still few documents for ofd and ceb, and there are only a handful of people who've even hit those pitfalls. Few projects are willing to chew on this area, and even fewer open-source it after chewing through it.

At the end of the tweet, Uncle Cat joked that if you use it and don't say 'badass,' he'll come find you in Shenzhen and chop you down in person. This way of speaking wouldn't be appropriate in formal product copy, but on an open-source project homepage, it actually feels right.