I’m trying to figure out if there’s a method to automatically highlight certain words when displaying a Word document through Google Docs viewer.
For instance, let’s say I have a document that contains multiple instances of the word “Process” and I want all of them to appear with a yellow background color when someone views the file through Google’s document viewer.
Is there a programmatic way to achieve this highlighting effect without having to manually open the document, make edits, save the changes, and then reload it in the viewer? I’m looking for a more automated solution that can apply the highlighting on the fly.
Unfortunately, Google Docs viewer does not support real-time highlighting of text. There isn’t an API or a method to apply such modifications programmatically while viewing. The viewer only displays documents as they were originally formatted. From my experience in enterprise settings, the highlighting must be included in the source document. A practical approach would be to use the Google Docs API to preprocess your documents beforehand. Using the batchUpdate method, you can identify specific text patterns and apply background colors. This requires uploading the document to Google Drive, making the necessary changes through the API, and then serving the updated version. While this may not qualify as on-the-fly highlighting, it does streamline the process within your document workflow.
been there - super frustrating, right? i converted my docs to pdf first, then used a pdf.js viewer with custom highlighting. works really smoothly and you can inject your highlighting logic before it renders. takes more setup than you’d want, but at least you get full control without Google’s restrictions.
I’ve hit this same wall building a document management system. Google Docs viewer is read-only - you can’t modify anything dynamically. But here’s what worked for me: I built a custom JavaScript overlay that kicks in after the doc loads. It pulls text from the DOM and adds CSS highlighting to matching terms. Not perfect since formatting can get wonky, but it handled basic highlighting pretty well. You could also convert docs to HTML first, which gives you full control over styling and highlighting before embedding. More work upfront, but you won’t be fighting Google’s limitations.