Displaying a word Document on screen Using Flash.

[gvnirmal]

Displaying a word Document on screen Using Flash. Hi,
I need to display a microsoft word document (not a text document)on screen using a flash player, can anyone tell me how this can be done?
Please help
Ajay

[pingnak]

Yes. Lots of ways. They all probably 'suck'.

1. (Easiest) Export it to HTML and display it with a TextField.

2. Print it to images of pages and send and display them, instead.

3. You could probably bounce it off a server process that had a gutted version of OpenOffice, then serve it up as one of the above. You certainly wouldn't support much traffic doing that.

4. Perhaps even use 'Google Documents' to host the file and cobble together the 'View as HTML' URL to get the pages into Flash.

You'll have a pretty low chance of successfully importing it as a ByteArray, reverse-engineering MS-Office format du jour, parsing the document into Flash, and displaying it correctly. Not to mention making sure it will read all the old file format versions. In short, MS Office files are in a proprietary format that nobody else's software will read without TONS of effort keeping up with their routine and arbitrary changes to it. They don't even support the 'Open Document' XML format right.