DocSharp

DocSharp is a pure C# library to convert between document formats without Office interop or native dependencies.

The following packages are currently available:

• DocSharp.Binary: convert Office 97-2003 binary documents (doc, xls, ppt) to OpenXML documents (docx, xlsx, pptx). This is a fork of the abandoned b2xtranslator project which provides critical fixes.
• DocSharp.Docx: convert DOCX to Markdown and RTF. Possible applications include generating Open XML documents in C# and exporting for other editors, or loading Word documents in a RichTextBox / RichEditBox control.
• DocSharp.Markdown: convert Markdown to DOCX using a custom Markdig renderer.

Packages can be installed via NuGet:

There is no common DOM to manipulate or generate documents, this library is mainly for conversion. However, the Docx package provides some helper methods on top of the Open XML SDK that may be extended in the future.
If your main purpose is creating documents from scratch you can consider the following libraries: OfficeIMO, OpenXML-Office, ClosedXML, ShapeCrawler.

Supported features

• Binary formats: almost all doc/xls/ppt features were supported by the original project, but exceptions occurred when using .NET (rather than .NET Framework) or loading specific documents/encodings. Most errors should be fixed now but more work is needed to make the library reliable; if you find other bugs, you are welcome to open an issue (please attach a sample file if the issue only occurs for specific documents).
• DOCX to RTF:
  • Text and most font formatting
  • Paragraph options, lists and tables: many properties are not supported yet, but should be sufficient for medium documents.
  • Images (basic):
    • JPEG, PNG and EMF are supported.
    • Effects and wrap layouts are not implemented yet.
  • Hyperlinks and bookmarks
  • Page setup: size, orientation, margins, borders
  • Header and footer
  • TODO: math formulas, drawings, OLE objects and more
• DOCX to Markdown:
  • Text and basic formatting
    • Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript
    • Any highlight color is converted to <mark>
  • Inline images
    • ImagesOutputFolder needs to be set to an existing directory, otherwise images are skipped. An absolute URI is used by default; to produce a relative URI set ImagesBaseUriOverride to any not-null folder path (empty string or "." means same folder as the Markdown file, "../images" means images subfolder in the parent folder).
    • Some image types are not recognized (e.g. WordPad embeds images in a different way compared to MS Word and other word processors).
    • Images should be in JPEG, PNG or GIF format to be supported by browsers; BMP is partially supported but not recommended. There is currently no automatic image conversion implemented.
    • Crop and effects are not supported.
  • Tables (values only)
  • External hyperlinks
  • Page breaks are converted to horizontal lines
  • TODO: H1-H6 headers (Word styles), bookmarks (internal hyperlinks), lists, math formulas, charts; support for encrypted Word documents
• Markdown to DOCX:
  • Basic Markdown features
  • External hyperlinks
  • Bookmarks for internal hyperlinks to headings (GitHub-like auto-identifiers)
  • Images
    • The converter attempts to read local images and download online images (http/https URLs only). If this behavior is not desired, set SkipImages to true.
    • Images specified as absolute URLs are processed by default. For relative URLs ImagesBaseUri needs to be set to an absolute local directory path or http(s) URL, which will be combined with the image URL at runtime, such as: C:\Data + ./images/image1.jpg (all kind of URIs should be recognized).
    • WEBP and AVIF images are ignored as they are not supported in DOCX documents; base64 is also ignored as it is rarely used and not supported by many Markdown processors.
  • Tables (experimental)
  • TODO: other internal hyperlinks types, HTML tags (<u>, <sup>, <sub>, <mark>, ...), math and other extensions

Roadmap

• Support more elements and attributes, and fix issues on edge cases
• Reverse RTF to DOCX conversion
• Documentation: for now you can refer to the sample app. When ready, any documentation will be available in the project Wiki.

Credits

Dependencies:

• Open XML SDK
• Markdig - for DocSharp.Markdown only

Forked:

• b2xtranslator
• markdig.docx

Others:

• Html2OpenXml for images header decoding and unit conversions.

License

DocSharp is licensed under MIT license and can be used for both open source and commercial projects.