What is docx4j?

docx4j is an open source (Apache v2) library for creating, editing, and saving OpenXML “packages”, including docx, pptx, and xslx.  it is similar to Microsoft’s OpenXML SDK, but for Java rather than .NET.   It uses JAXB to create the Java objects out of the OpenXML parts.

Notable features for docx include export as HTML or PDF, and CustomXML databinding for document generation (including our OpenDoPE convention support for processing repeats and conditions).

The docx4j project started in October 2007.

What’s new?

This is mainly a maintenance release; things of note include:

• Improvements to Maven build
• ContentAccessor interface
• AlteredParts: identify parts in this pkg which are new or altered; Patcher
  which adds new or altered parts.
• Support for .glox SmartArt package (/src/glox/)
• JAXB RI 2.2.3 compatibilty
• OpenDoPE support improvements

Where do you get it?

Binaries: You can download a jar alone or a tar.gz with all deps or pick and choose.

Source: Checkout the source from SVN (use the pom.xml file to satisfy the dependencies eg with m2eclipse, or download them from one of the links above)

Maven: Please see forum for details (since XML doesn’t paste nicely here right now).

Dependency changes

Antlr is now required for OpenDoPE processing; this gives us better XPath processing.  The required jars are:

• antrl-2.7.7
• antrl-runtime-3.3
• stringtemplate-3.2.1

Getting Started

See the “Getting Started” guide.

Thanks to our contributors

A number of contributions have made this release what it is; thanks very much to those who contributed.

Contributors to this release and a more complete list of changes may be found in README.txt

A request to docx4j users

If you are happily using docx4j, it would be great if you could reply to this post with some words of recommendation for others who might be wondering whether docx4j is a good choice. I know there are thousands of you out there

Some users have been kind enough to make such statements already; these may be found on the trac homepage.

Of course, there are a number of other ways you can contribute back.  Please consider doing so, especially if you think you might find yourself looking for support from volunteers in the docx4j forums.

With the utility, you can take 2 or more Word documents, and join them into one.

As Eric White’s blog explained:

This programming task is complicated by the need to keep other parts of the document in sync with the data stored in paragraphs. For example, a paragraph can contain a reference to a comment in the comments part, and if there is a problem with this reference, the document is invalid. You must take care when moving / inserting / deleting paragraphs to maintain ‘referential integrity’ within the document.

With this utility, merging/concatenating documents is as easy as invoking the method:

public  WordprocessingMLPackage merge(List<WordprocessingMLPackage> wmlPkgs)

In other words, you pass a list of docx, and get a single new docx back.

This utility takes care of the niggly edge cases for you:

You can also use my MergeDocx utility to process a docx which is embedded as an altChunk.

Without this utility, you had to rely on Word to convert the altChunk to normal content.

That meant you had to round trip your docx through Word, before docx4j could create a PDF or HTML out of it.

Now you don’t.

To process the w:altChunk elements in a docx, you invoke:

public WordprocessingMLPackage process(WordprocessingMLPackage srcPackage)

You pass in a docx containg altChunks, and get a  new docx back which doesn’t.

But wait a minute .. if you can merge Word documents using this tool, why would you ever put an altChunk (containing a docx, as opposed to HTML) into the docx in the first place?

Ordinarily you wouldn’t, you’d just merge with this tool instead.  But there are at least 2 possibilities:

• some upstream process put the altChunk there, and now you want to process it in docx4j
• OpenDoPE.  The Open Document Processing Ecosystem convention is being extended in a v2.3 to allow other documents to be injected, and a natural thing is to convert an injection instruction to an altChunk

There is one place my code differs significantly from how Word processes an altChunk, and that is in section handling.  When Word processes an altChunk, it seems to largely remove sectPr.  So for example, columns will disappear.  But it also might merge headers, so the resulting header contains stuff from the headers of both documents!  My code doesn’t do that: by default, it includes each section, and headers go with sections.

docx4j is an open source (Apache license) project which facilitates the manipulation of Microsoft OpenXML docx (and now pptx) documents in Java, using JAXB.

The main features of this release are support for pptx files, and improvements to HTML export (via NG2), and PDF export (via XSL FO).

For further details, please see the release announcement.

Of course, you can just play with one of the pre-existing shared documents.

The video width is 1280 pixels, so if you are browsing in a narrow window, you’ll need to expand your browser window to see it properly.  (Everybody has screens that wide these days don’t they, unless they are mobile?)

For completeness:

• here is the download link for our Word Add-In
  
• are you a Mac OSX or Linux user, or don’t have Word 2007?  check out docx4all
• if you can’t see the username/password in the video, please see here. The password is “tester”.
• any test documents you create using that logon will be publicly visible.  If you want your own private space, you can set that up here

For a good while now, with Plutext you’ve been able to be in a Word document at the same time as your co-workers – provided all you were doing was working on tables and paragraphs (editing them, inserting, deleting or moving them around).

With this latest release, you can add images and Word comments, and have them replicate properly between Word 2007 users.

Here is a screencast of this in action:

If you want to play with this yourself, you can download our Word Add-In and give it a shot!

For username & password, please see here. The password is “tester”.

For detailed instructions, see this PDF, or this earlier screencast.

If you’d like to chat about your own Plutext installation, please contact us using this form.

This screencast shows a docx4all user and a Word user doing that:

docx4all will work on any platform if you have Java 6 installed – including Windows, OSX, or Linux.

You can try collaborating now, in your web browser by clicking here (warning: ~10 MB).  The download is of course one-time.  Next time, it will start quicker.

That link takes you to the docx4all applet, which does collaboration in your web browser.

You can also run docx4all as a desktop application – the functionality is identical.

The nice thing about the docx4all experience is that with just one-click you can be collaborating. Ok, a couple of clicks – one to start docx4all, and another to do File > Open.

Because all changes are versioned, from the Plutext menu you can see:

• a history of all the changes which have been made to a given content control

• a version of the document showing the most recent change to each paragraph

docx4j is an open source Java library for manipulating OpenXML WordprocessingML documents, released under the Apache software licence. docx is the default file format in Word 2007 in Microsoft Office 2007, and part of an ISO standard (more or less unchanged).

v2.1.0 is mainly a maintenance release.

Attention has been paid to ease of use of hyperlinks, images, and headers/footers.

The HTML output has been redone to use the XSLT from the OpenXMLViewer project; it can be configured to save images as files, and automatic list numbers are handled.

This release should also work under Java 1.5, now that I have re-built fop-fonts.  I had contributed TTC (true type collection) handling code to FOP, and it was accepted, so fop-fonts now uses that (ie the patch which makes fop-fonts is that much smaller).

docx4j is an open source Java library for manipulating OpenXML WordprocessingML documents, released under the Apache software licence. docx is the default file format in Word 2007 in Microsoft Office 2007.

docx4j supports the following:

• Open existing docx (from filesystem, SMB/CIFS, WebDAV using VFS)
• Create new docx (just one line of code)
• Programmatically manipulate the docx document (of course), including tables, images
• Import a binary doc (proof of concept)
• Import/export Word 2007′s xmlPackage (pkg) format
• Save docx to filesystem as a docx (ie zipped), or to JCR (unzipped)
• Apply transforms, including common filters
• Export as HTML or PDF
• Diff/compare paragraphs or sdt (content controls), outputting OpenXML with changes marked up
• Font support (font substitution, and use of any fonts embedded in the document)
• Use the power of JAXB to do other cool stuff

Get it from here.

What is it about this release that warrants being labeled v2.0?

The new features include image support, diff, and xmlPackage.  A factor is the version numbering convention Microsoft has chosen for their Open XML SDK: its v2.0 which will first contain an API for WordprocessingML.

So think of a “level 1″ API as one which handles the Open Packaging conventions (basically, the unzipping step), but leaves you to handle the document (part) content using low level XML (DOM, SAX, etc).

A “level 2″ API is one which gives you a higher level API to manipulate the part content.  At the very least, this would include objects to represent paragraphs, tables, styles etc.  But you’d also expect it to be easy, for example, to add a paragraph using a specified style (maybe this is “level 3″?  In any case, docx4j can do it)

Given that docx4j brought a “level 2″ WordML API to the Java world 6 months ago, it is appropriate that it be labelled version 2.0.

We’ve added quite a few features since I last blogged about docx4all (21 Feb).

New features include:

• font handling
• editable source view
• VFS file chooser (including WebDAV)
• incoming document filter

The VFS file chooser allows docx4all to open documents not just from the local file system, but also from a WebDAV server (such as Alfresco), and potentially, CIFS etc.  To do this, docx4all uses VFSJFileChooser, and webdavclient4j (a project we’ve started to address the gap left when Apache retired Slide, including its WebDAV client).

The incoming document filter is used to convert certain features of WordprocessingML which docx4all can’t yet handle, into something it can.   Examples include proofErr, hyperlink, and lastRenderedPageBreak.  This behaviour relies on a feature of docx4j, which makes it easy to apply a transform to a docx package (by converting it to pkg:package format).

Docx4all can’t yet render tables (let alone edit them), but we’re working on changing that.

This is a response to feedback on an earlier post.  This is also the last license change we’ll be making to docx4j. Word documents are mostly manipulated in corporate environments.  This change removes barriers to adoption of docx4j by business and institutions.

docx4j uses org.merlin.io to efficiently turn streams inside out. That package had been available under the GPL.  Its author, Merlin Hughes, today kindly released it under v2 of the Apache License, so we now use it under that license.

There’s a new nightly build of docx4j available from the downloads page if you want to grab it.  This build can load/save to/from a WebDAV server – more on that in another post.