Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

54 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by kbyatnal

13 Comments

hobofan

6 minutes ago

Thanks, that looks awesome! We were looking to add DOCX and XLSX preview to our app, and were planning to do server-side conversion to PDF (which seems to be what most other apps resort to) due to the lack of good libraries to render it, and this is exactly what we were looking for! :)

andrewlu0

a minute ago

thanks! would love to get your feedback

i can't promise its visually 1:1 with Word/Excel but its pretty close on the corpus we tested with

egeozcan

15 minutes ago

Why doesn't it mention anywhere that they are React components?

andrewlu0

3 minutes ago

we'll try to make it more clear on the landing/introduction page!

spankalee

2 hours ago

These should really be web components. Leaving out every framework other than React is really bad for the web.

andrewlu0

24 minutes ago

thats fair and definitely something we can try supporting in the future. we started with React because of how familiar models are with shadcn and tailwind

we hope this can be useful for people building in React though!

CraigJPerry

an hour ago

Those bounding box demos are decent.

By quirk of fate i've spent the past 2 days prototyping some stuff on pdfjs. Just trying to figure out a game plan for handling bounding boxes in the face of page zooming, different resolutions etc. etc. I can't see it mentioned whether the components are virtualising pages (as in reusing dom elements as document pages scroll by). I guess i just learned what i'll be exploring tomorrow then...

andrewlu0

an hour ago

yes - the pdf/docx viewer use react-virtual to virtualize the pages

the zoom should work with the bounding box highlights, we're working on adding rotation support

warthog

2 hours ago

really like these - curious how the xlsx editor and viewer is built in that what kind of headless spreadsheet?

could not have been easy

andrewlu0

2 hours ago

Hi! I'm one of the engineers at Extend that worked on this - one of our other engineers created a Rust XLSX/XLS parser that we ported to WASM to our @extend-ai/react-xlsx package which handles the rendering/charts. It exposes some hooks so users can use their own components for the toolbar

drivingmenuts

an hour ago

How much was actual engineering and how much was telling an AI what to do?

KolmogorovComp

43 minutes ago

> This page could not load

On mobile Safari…

andrewlu0

37 minutes ago

hm seems to look ok on mine - is this on the root page?