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TinyDOCX

Word/ODT library (14x smaller than docx)

Details

External ID
46355484
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
TinyDOCX
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Dec. 22, 2025
Cohort
—
Upvotes
6
Upvotes percentile
0.2652671755725191
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

After posting tinypdf here, someone opened an issue asking for Word/OpenOffice support. I understand - sometimes you need an editable document, not a PDF.I didn't want to extend the library itself, so I built tinydocx: <1K lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 7.7KB minified+gzipped. The popular docx package is 108KB with 5 dependencies.What's included: - Text formatting (bold/italic/underline/strikethrough, colors, custom fonts) - Headings (H1-H6) - Tables with borders and column widths - Bullet and numbered lists (with nesting) - Images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP) - Hyperlinks - Headers/footers with page numbers - Blockquotes and code blocks - Markdown to DOCX conversion - ODT (OpenDocument) support with the same APIWhat's not included: - Table of contents, footnotes, bookmarks - Track changes, comments - Multi-column layouts, text wrapping - Reading/modifying existing .docx files - Math equations, drawing shapesDOCX files are just ZIP archives containing XML. Once you understand the structure, generating simple documents is straightforward. The hard part is knowing which XML elements Word actually requires vs. what's optional cruft.Works great for invoices, reports, form letters - anything where you want the recipient to edit the document. Pairs nicely with tinypdf when you need both formats.GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinydocx npm: npm install tinydocx

Enrichment

Theme
document and PDF utility tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
lightweight word and odt document library
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Generating OpenXML (.docx) and OpenDocument (.odt) formats from scratch with zero dependencies in under 1,000 lines requires meticulous reverse engineering of complex, deeply nested XML specifications and ZIP packaging.

What it would actually take: Requires an in-depth understanding of the ISO/IEC 29500 (OpenXML) and OASIS OpenDocument specifications. The system constructs valid raw XML trees for document relationships, content types, styles, and body paragraphs, and pipes them directly through a lightweight compression/deflate algorithm to produce spec-compliant `.docx` and `.odt` archive binaries in pure TypeScript.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 174 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #160 of 175 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 40 days after the earliest competitor.

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