About Research Engineers
Research Engineers develop, sell and support engineering software for different kinds of use cases.
Problem
We came to Aspose for a reason: we had problems with viewing Microsoft Word documents in our current Java Rich Client project correctly. We show different formats of the document in our plugin viewer but the main format which we use for viewing is Adobe Acrobat. We can view other formats but usually, we convert them to PDF. We used Microsoft Word API for this purpose but there are some clients who do not have Microsoft Word or have old versions of it. Also, some of our clients wanted to use our plugin on machines where Microsoft Word was not installed. There is a lot of product that can convert word to pdf and some of those products maintain that they do not require Microsoft Word to be installed. But after study of those products and testing then in demo versions, we found that all of them require Microsoft Word even if they do not mention it. It means that they used is about the same API as we in our current project. Aspose uses really does offer implementation without Microsoft Word installed. It was very important to get the same view in our Tool as the document will be shown inside Microsoft Word as well.
View Microsoft Word documents inside our viewer with Aspose Word for Java
Solution
We choose Aspose Word for Java because it gives us the best results compare to other products. Our plugin viewer is implemented on JAVA though part of our code is in C++. We use the results of DLLs using JNI. It means that we can use your C++ product as well but Java is more convenient for us. The mainstream is conversion. The inputs are .docx documents and output are PDF documents. The user sees the generated PDF document but we found that some of our documents did not convert well enough and for them, we implemented direct viewing for Word documents with the Aspose product. This solved the problem but we would prefer conversion and hope that this item will be resolved for problematic documents though we do have a workaround.
Variety of mark up functions inside our viewer with Aspose Word for Java, that allow users to annotate the document
Experience
Finding a solution: We found Aspose after searching filters for rendering Microsoft Word documents and saw there were many different solutions for viewing MS Word files. After some research, we decided that Aspose Words for Java is the best solution that fits our needs.
Implementation: The first integration was quite fast - a few days because we have a lot of experience with this. For help, we used the Free support Forum and code samples.
Outcome: We find exactly this solution which we searched for. It seems to fit our needs and fix our problems. Now we need to see how it is working in a live environment.
Next Steps
The first step will be to put our development in a real environment. So using the Word rendering in case performance and quality. We hope for successful usage in a real environment. When this will be successful, perhaps we will use other products/filters from Aspose to upgrade our Application.
Summary
We had a really good experience with Aspose for Word. Integration was quite easy. Also the performance and quality of Aspose for Word and the output is really good. So would suggest other potential clients use Aspose for their needs.
**Frank Mantel
**Product Manager
Research Engineers REI GmbH & Co. KG