Help

Opening and creating documents

Which file formats can I open?

Word (.docx, legacy .doc), Excel (.xlsx, legacy .xls), PowerPoint (.pptx, legacy .ppt), comma-separated values (.csv) and PDF (.pdf). Pick a file with Open, drag and drop it onto the page, or pass a URL with /editor?file=https://… / /editor?src=https://… (the server hosting the file must allow cross-origin requests).

How do I create a new document?

Core opening, editing and conversion run locally in your browser without a required document upload. When autosave is enabled, recovery copies are kept in this browser’s IndexedDB for 7 days after the last edit or open. Closing a tab does not remove them. You can delete copies or disable autosave at /history. Browser storage can be cleared or evicted, and edits not yet autosaved may be lost; recovery is not a replacement for saving your file.

Is there a file size limit?

No fixed limit. The practical ceiling is your device's memory, because the whole document is parsed and rendered locally.

Editing and saving

How do I save my changes?

In Chrome, Edge and other browsers supporting the File System Access API, the first save asks you to choose a file and later saves write back to it. Other browsers download a copy. Export to another format with File → Download as. Recovery copies in the browser are separate from your saved file.

Why is the Save button sometimes greyed out?

The Save button lights up once the editor has fully loaded the document and you have made a change. If it stays grey after editing, the document did not finish loading — check the notification toast for an error and see the error-code section below.

Can I convert between formats?

Yes, on your device: open a document and choose the target format in Download as. Word documents export to DOCX / PDF / TXT, spreadsheets to XLSX / CSV / PDF, presentations to PPTX / PDF. CSV files are opened as a spreadsheet and can be saved back as CSV.

My Chinese / non-English CSV shows garbled characters elsewhere. What about here?

The editor sniffs the CSV encoding before opening it — strict UTF-8 first, then GB18030 (the "ANSI" encoding Excel uses for Chinese exports), then Latin-1 — so files that show mojibake in other tools open correctly. Saving writes UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, which Excel opens without a wizard.

PDF

What can I do with a PDF?

Open and read it (scroll, zoom, search), add comments and free-text annotations, and download it again as a PDF that keeps those annotations. Fillable forms can be filled.

Can I rewrite the text of an existing PDF like a Word document?

Not as free-flowing text — PDF is a fixed-layout format. To change wording, open the original DOCX / XLSX / PPTX and export a new PDF from it. Both steps happen on your device.

Read-only and embedding

Can I open a document read-only?

Yes. Add &readonly=1 to a /editor?file= link, or send document:set-readonly through the embed API. Read-only can be switched on and off at runtime without reloading the document.

Can I put the editor inside my own web app?

Yes — the editor is designed to be embedded in an iframe and driven with postMessage: your page fetches the file (with its own authentication), sends it into the iframe, and receives the edited File back to upload wherever you want. See the Embed API reference and the live demo.

Browser AI agents (WebMCP)

Can an AI assistant in my browser drive the editor?

WebMCP tools perform editing and conversion locally, but a browser agent can receive document text or exported files and may send them to its own AI service. Check the agent’s data policy before sharing confidential content.

Which browsers support it?

WebMCP is a proposal from the W3C Web Machine Learning Community Group, currently available in Chrome behind an origin trial. Firefox and Safari have not announced support. Where the browser does not provide the API, nothing is registered and nothing changes — it is a pure addition.

Does it work in an embedded editor?

No, by design. Tools are only registered when the editor is the top-level page. A cross-origin iframe would need the embedding page to grant allow="tools", which conflicts with how embedding is meant to work — so if you embed the editor, drive it with the Embed API instead.

Can the agent read the document's text?

For word-processing documents, yes: get_document_text returns the text so the agent can answer questions about the content without exporting anything. Spreadsheets and presentations do not expose a full-text read on this engine; the tool says so explicitly (rather than returning an empty answer that would look like an empty file) and points to exporting instead.

Offline and installation

Does it work offline?

Offline editing requires the application, editor engine, converter and relevant fonts and format resources to be cached and retained by your browser. One visit or PWA installation does not guarantee this. Remote file URLs require a network connection.

How do I get the newest version?

The site updates itself on the next visit. If a page seems stuck on an old build, hard-refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R / ⌘⇧R) or unregister the service worker in the browser's site settings.

Privacy

Are my documents uploaded anywhere?

Core opening, editing and conversion run locally in your browser without a required document upload. The built-in AI assistant is unfinished and is not a released feature. An embedding host can receive exported files and upload them according to its own policy.

What does the page load from the network?

The page loads application code, editor resources, fonts and a Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon. Remote file URLs can make additional requests. Embedding hosts and external browser agents determine their own data handling.

Errors

What do the error codes in the notification mean?

• -85 — the file content does not match its extension (for example an HTML page saved as .xls, or a .docx that is actually a .doc). Rename or re-export the file.
• -82 — the file could not be converted; it may be corrupted, password-protected, or in a variant the engine does not support.
• -24 / -25 — a script of the editor failed to load, usually a network hiccup or a stale cached build. Hard-refresh and try again.
• 80 — export failed inside the converter. Try another target format; if it persists please open an issue with the file type and steps.

Something looks broken. Where do I report it?

Open an issue on GitHub with the browser and version, the file type, and — if it is not confidential — a file that reproduces the problem. A minimal reproduction beats a description.

Self-hosting

Can I run my own copy?

Yes. It is a static site, so any web server works: docker run -d -p 8080:80 ghcr.io/ranuts/document:latest, or build with pnpm run build and serve the dist/ folder. See the README for HTTPS and basic-auth options and the changelog for what each release changed.

What remains after I close the tab?

When autosave is enabled, recovery copies are kept in this browser’s IndexedDB for 7 days after the last edit or open. Closing a tab does not remove them. You can delete copies or disable autosave at /history. Browser storage can be cleared or evicted, and edits not yet autosaved may be lost; recovery is not a replacement for saving your file.

Is a built-in AI assistant available?

The built-in AI assistant is unfinished and is not a released feature. An embedding host can receive exported files and upload them according to its own policy.