The problem is, we dont have MS Office in our university anymore, earlier we used its preview feature in Windows File Explorer, so to view multiple assignments on the fly by just clicking on the word file or using arrow keys navigation. This helped us the teachers, to check many assignments without having to open each file 1 by 1. Now we switched to WPS Office, thus the preview feature in windows explorer is gone. This made the assignments checking extremely slow as now we have to open each file before marking it.
I am a teacher too, who can code a little, so I want to build up an application in windows forms, that enables to preview .docx, .dox and .rtf files. I tried hard since 1.5 months so far, used Pandoc, OpenXML Powertools, tried with trial versions of libraries like Aspire, Aspose, GemBox, Xceeds
But so far no free and reliable solution is found, some of them either spoil the formatting in unacceptable way. Some of them have trial limits. Most of them do not convert word own drawings (that the students draw inside Word document itself).
So basically I am looking for a reliable and free resource that converts the whole document, doesn't miss anything and is free. We the teachers, still can overlook formatting a little.
What I have tried: Everything as listed above, in win forms application
Current best solution working for us: Using Syncfusion DocIO library to convert the said file formats to PDF and then loading that PDF in a CefSharp browser control in winforms. This requires just ~2 seconds load time of the document and gives nice zooming options. But its a trial version and eventually it will expire after trial period.
NOTE: I cannot use any online or server based solution as it will be very slow (consider clicking on the file and then waiting for more than 10 seconds to load a converted document).
