236 points · 71 comments · 23 hours ago · kbyatnal
extend.aiDemo video here: https://share.extend.ai/kRmSGKRF
When we started, we tried every file viewer and document component library we could find. Unfortunately, none of them had all the functionality (and polish) that we wanted, so we ended up building our own for https://extend.ai/. It was only ever meant to be internal, but enough customers kept asking for it that we decided to open source it.
It's useful for building document processing agents, real-time user facing document intake flows, or all kinds of internal tooling.
We naively thought this would be a solved problem. Turns out, making PDF/XLSX/DOCX viewers that work at scale is not trivial...we use and maintain it for Extend ourselves, so we've fixed a lot of edge cases that came up while running millions of pages / day through our own system. Our hope is that with our resources + community support, it'll keep getting better over time.
lionkor
pea
dvt
Thanks for releasing publicly.
sails
React/next is limiting, we have rebuilt this for angular and now redid it again using lit for better compatibility. Our old one is very similar to this.
Loading citations for each field across 1000s of pages, colliding citations for all the messy formats, zoom, rotate etc. what a mess!
Great that you took the time to MIT this as it would have saved us many hours, though I think today Fable + Codex makes it pretty quick
I could recreate these in lit as a fork, would be very useful to have the full set
CraigJPerry
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...
iamsaitam
egeozcan
codingconstable
whitephoenix
mklifelife
I'm curious whether the primary users are AI-native document products or more traditional SaaS applications.
The document-app niche feels increasingly important with the rise of AI workflows.
qreoct
Is this a known issue?
greenleafone7
rolls-reus
spankalee
hobofan
warthog
could not have been easy
promiseofbeans
phonon
dzonga
plastic041
deafpolygon
stinger
cactusplant7374
carlosjobim
KolmogorovComp
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wu1064442747
peteforde
1. I saw it was React
2. Nothing loading, just a page full of spinners
I truly wish React could be launched into the sun.
- no caching for file previews
- no sorting by date in the file picker
- no sorting by size in the file picker
- no sorting by file type in the file picker
- no search in the file picker
- cant enter a folder in the detail view (only expand) in the file picker
- cant go to page (by page number) in the document viewer
- after clicking a button in the document viewer, focus is lost on the document and arrow keys, space, pgup/pgdown dont work until the document is clicked again
- cant select text in the document viewer, unless I search first, in which case it then works
This is after looking at the file picker and document viewer less than 3 minutes(!!!). I gave up after that. Getting 80% of a file picker is easy, getting the last 20% done, so that it's on par with existing software, is not.
Very very odd to have things look this polished, yet be this terrible functionality- and performance-wise. These are not random quirky new ideas I'm having, these have been basics that work in every single file picker and document viewer since the early days of UI, before the web.