I’m working on a personal project to make a Google Docs-style app using NextJS and Quill. I want to show small previews of each document in a list, kind of like how Google Docs does it. I tried just showing the first 100 letters of each doc in tiny text, but that doesn’t keep the formatting.
Does anyone know a good way to make these little document previews? I want them to look nice and show some of the formatting, not just plain text.
I’m pretty new to this stuff, so any tips or ideas would be super helpful. Thanks!
Creating document previews like Google Docs is a challenging task, especially when you want to maintain formatting. One approach you could consider is using a headless browser solution like Puppeteer. This would allow you to render a small portion of the document with full formatting, then capture a screenshot of it. You’d need to set up a separate service for this, possibly using a serverless function.
Another option is to use a library like html2canvas to render the formatted content client-side and generate a preview image. This might be more straightforward to implement in a NextJS app, but could have performance implications for large numbers of documents.
Remember to optimize your previews for performance, possibly by caching them or generating them asynchronously. Good luck with your project!
hey aroberts, i’ve been messin with this kinda stuff too. have u tried react-pdf? it’s pretty cool for renderin pdfs in react apps. might work for ur previews if u convert docs to pdf first. Just an idea, not sure if it’ll fit ur setup exactly. good luck with ur project man!
I’ve faced a similar challenge in one of my projects and found that combining html2canvas with a custom React component produced good results. I rendered a scaled-down version of the document in a hidden div, captured it as an image using html2canvas, and then used that image as the preview. This method preserved much of the document’s formatting while generally performing well for various document types. However, it can be resource-intensive when dealing with complex documents or many previews. To improve performance, I implemented lazy loading for visible items and cached previews in localStorage. Also, it is important to ensure that preview generation does not block the main thread, so using Web Workers can be a beneficial option if needed.