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 possibly other formats in the future).
• DocSharp.Markdown: convert Markdown to DOCX using a custom Markdig renderer.

There is no common DOM to manipulate or generate documents, this library is for conversion only. Additional features which allow easier creation and manipulation of OpenXML documents may be added in the future, for now you can use the Open XML SDK or other libraries built on top of it: 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. 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 Markdown:
  • Text and basic formatting
    • Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough
    • Any highlight color (except none) 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.
  • Tables (values only)
  • External hyperlinks
  • Page breaks are converted to horizontal lines
  • TODO: styles (including H1-H6 headers), 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

• Publish NuGet packages
• Support more elements and attributes, and fix issues on edge cases
• RTF to DOCX and DOCX to RTF
• 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

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.