Selfhosted @lemmy.world fikran @lemm.ee 3w ago

Web-based Document Editor?

Hi all,

What fast but functional document editor do you recommend? I would like to add custom fonts and do some page layout work, but otherwise nothing too fancy.

Suggestions?

32 comments

OnlyOffice is probably going to be your best bet.
- Why not libreoffice
  
  Edit: I believe it’s maintained unlike the former
  
  OnlyOffice is not the unmaintained OpenOffice.
  
  So, LibreOffice can be used over the Internet in a web browser?
- As long as you’re okay with an interface that slavishly clones the terrible MS-Word ribbon bar.
  
  Okay, what would be your alternative?
Nextcloud has collabora integrated.
- Unfortunately I am not a fan of NextCloud, it's just too slowwwwww :(
  
  I had the same experience, tried other stuff and eventually came back. Maybe I didn't have redis and Maria setup right before but it's much better for me this time around.
  
  Totally not saying that's what was up for you though, it's not for everyone.
  
  it's definitively fast on my installation. Might I suggest looking at the log level and making sure it's not set to INFO or DEBUG? That's what was holding my instance back.
  
  you can set up collabora without nextcloud, as well
  
  My AIO is very fast on mid hardware
i don't know much about custom fonts, but there are two main options for self-hosted "word" replacements:

Collabora CODE - LibreOffice wrapped up as a web application

OnlyOffice

I use Collabora with Nextcloud (hence the link).
There’s cryptpad though I don’t have a clue how complicated it is to manage. But it’s a decent user experience.
- Cryptpad is basically a frontend to ONLYOFFICE web. It's nice, but ONLYOFFICE requires quite a bit of system resources because its java based. As an alternative, I highly recommend WPS Office instead. Significantly more lightweight. It's an application for Portainer-EE, too. So it's basically a 1 click install.
  
  This is like that other recommendation of a linuxserver/kasmvnc docker image as well. It doesn't allow for collaborative editing like cryptpad or google docs does.
Moving this to a top-level comment.

Overleaf is fantastic, as long as you are okay with non-WYSIWYG document editing and learning some LaTeX.

Typst is also worth looking at, as a similar concept. It uses a very different language than LaTeX, but feels more in touch with modern sensibilities.
- i find the latex fonts weird to deal with. for me it is more a thing of setting up your template the way you want it and keep sailing with that.
  
  edit: typo
  
  I find them okay, but I am much more concerned with consistent fonts than with a variety of decorative fonts.
  
  The default fonts feel very old-fashioned though.
you could have a look at etherpad. seems pretty cool and is extensible with plugins. i don't know about resource consumption and security aspects, tho, because i don't personally use it. there are also a few publicly usable instances to test it out (see their github). keep in mind, however, that those come with plugins and do not reflect the vanilla state of the tool.
@fikran VSCode

32 comments