For several years already we’ve been growing Aspose.Words in the following four strategic feature directions:

  • Conversions
  • Programming
  • Rendering
  • Reporting

It just came to me that this is indeed our “mantra” and it helps us to explain many things that we do, but ultimately, it helps you to understand what Aspose.Words is about and what you can expect. Here is a brief recap:

Conversions - Aspose.Words supports a number of load or import document formats and a number of save or export formats. All loads and saves work through a single document object model and this allows Aspose.Words to convert documents from any load format to any save format, resulting in quite a big number of possible conversions. We aim to provide the most complete implementation of each format to ensure high quality of document conversions.

Programming - Aspose.Words provides a rich document object model that allows to create or modify documents, extract, find and replace content and formatting. Things like adding a watermark, extracting images, splitting and combining documents are easy to do.

Rendering - Aspose.Words implements its own page layout engine that is responsible for laying out a document into pages as close to how Microsoft Word does it as possible. Then, a growing number of renderers can output the pages into one of the fixed-layout page formats. At the moment this includes PDF and XPS. Also, Aspose.Words can render images of pages (thumbnails) to any size or scale to the .NET Graphics object, a form or a printer.

The rendering feature of Aspose.Words allows building unprecedented solutions that include conversion of Word (and other) documents to PDF, XPS, generating previews and printing on a server or client, anywhere.

Note that Rendering is at the moment available only in Aspose.Words for .NET. Rendering will be available in Aspose.Words for Java later in 2009.

Reporting - Aspose.Words provides a mechanism to easily populate documents with data from various data sources in a mail merge-like manner. Your data can come from any database, from an XML document, from a LINQ query or from any business objects.

And at last, but not least, all of this works without utilizing Microsoft Word.

You can see the diagram that shows the Aspose.Words CPRR mantra and provides more information in the documentation, Introducing Aspose.Words and on the Aspose.Words Home Page.