OneBox common document formats

[schungx (Stephen Chung)]

When users upload attachments to posts which are not images (for example, common document formats such as PowerPoint, Excel, Word, PDF or equivalents), when these resource URL’s are called up, is it possible to OneBox them as well?

For example, Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents have Titles, Summaries, Authors etc. set which may work nicely on a OneBox digest format. All that is required is to detect the format of the upload (based on extension is probably enough) and then extract pieces of useful info from the files to display in OneBox.

For example, PowerPoint and PDF documents may even show a thumbnail of the first page.

[fefrei (Felix Freiberger)]

This is a duplicate of an older feature request:

Oneboxing of PDFs and other attachments

Continuing the discussion from Custom visualization for specific attachment types: Putting this out there as a feature request. I’d love to see the ability to onebox PDFs and other attachments along the lines of google docs oneboxing. Or perhaps even simply a file attachment appearance like you’d get using the file upload, ideally also with the file type and size provided. Right now putting a PDF URL on its own line presents as a raw URL. Very 1990s. As my millenial colleague told me recently,…

It’s already implemented for PDF files, adding this feature for other file types would require shipping additional parsers for these files with Discourse.

[schungx (Stephen Chung)]

@fefrei you’re right.

I searched for a while with OneBox and other strings, but didn’t come up with that topic. OneBox PDF found it nicely.