Possibility to preview office files in indico?

1

From time to time people will upload pptx or docx attachment instead of pdf format. It would be great that we can preview these office files just like pdf files, instead of downloading first, especially when browsing a large amount of talks in a conference.

Website like ownclound use onlyoffice to view office files. Maybe that is too heavy since it can also edit files.
Microsoft also have office.js library which can preview. Other commercial lib like viewerjs.org, pdfjs.express/documentation/advanced/open-ms-office also should work. Besides those, I found a couple of lightweight js libs for this purpose, e.g.,

  • pptx-viewer: https://github.com/elliottcarlson/pptx-viewer
  • js-pptx: https://github.com/won21kr/js-pptx
  • PPTXjs: https://github.com/meshesha/PPTXjs
  • docx-viewer: https://github.com/naskio/docx-viewer
  • docx-preview: https://www.npmjs.com/package/docx-preview
  • docx4js: https://www.npmjs.com/package/docx4js
  • mammoth: https://github.com/mwilliamson/mammoth.js
  • …

So the question is, does you guys thinks it make sense to have this feature inside indico?

2

Someone could develop a plugin for this. There are already plugins for other file types (jupyter notebooks + code syntax highlighting) that could be used as a starting point on how to implement it: GitHub - indico/indico-plugins: Indico plugins developed by the Indico team

Obviously this would need to be based on Open Source libraries, at least we would not accept any plugins contributed upstream to the indico-plugins repo that rely on commercial libraries/tools.