New Export to Word converter v.1.6.0 released

HTML badge on the left, Word badge on the right. Between them arrow directing from HTML icon to Word icon.

We are happy to announce the release of the HTML to MS Word v1.6.0 converter, the service that powers CKEditor’s own Export to Word feature. The latest version brings better support for table comments and suggestions, an auto-paragraphing feature, and improved compatibility with older MS Word versions.

# New features

# Auto paragraphing

The v1.6.0 release introduces auto paragraphing for orphan nodes. Orphan text or inline nodes are now automatically wrapped with paragraphs within a body element. This feature makes HTML to Word conversion more forgivable in the case of a less strict HTML structure that is not following best practices. As an example, the below HTML will be still properly converted into a Word document by wrapping orphan inline nodes:

<body>
  This line will be wrapped within a paragraph by auto paragraphing feature.
  <p>Some example paragraph.</p>
  <strong
    >Another line of orphan inline content that will be detected by
  </strong>
  the <em>auto paragraphing feature</em>
</body>

The feature will help to generate proper Word documents without the requirement of pre-processing initial HTML.

# Improved comments and suggestions

Support for content comments inside table cells has been added, as well as support for content suggestions inside table cells. This change largely improves the collaborative writing experience, extending the portability of multi-user edited content and allowing for more seamless cross-platform collaboration.

# Better compatibility support

MS Word may be industry standard and the most popular rich-text editor in the world, but it took 40 years to reach this position. On the way, the word processor has evolved so much, it has sometimes problems with its own backward compatibility. Facing this challenge, we bring you improved features compatibility for older MS Word versions. While it works just fine with Word 365, we keep on struggling to make older versions just as compatible.

On the heels of compatibility work, documents with images in the base64 format and tables are now correctly supported when opening documents with older MS Word versions.

# Bug fixes

Apart from new features, we worked on eliminating any possible problems. Lates release sees the perishing of the following bugs:

Fixed empty href in links breaking document conversion.
Fixed generating broken documents caused by the invalid markup for comments.
Fixed an issue where code snippets in table cells have an additional paragraph under a snippet.
Fixed an issue with blockquote elements including a plain text content breaking document conversion.

You can read more about the HTML to Word converter and its practical applications in a dedicated blog post.