office-render

name

office-render

description

Use when you need to SEE how a Microsoft Office file actually renders on macOS — preview/screenshot/convert a Word .docx, PowerPoint .pptx, or Excel .xlsx to PDF or page images, visually QA a generated Office document, check fonts/tables/slide layout, or read a doc's real appearance. Renders with the REAL Office apps (Word/PowerPoint/Excel), which is far more faithful than LibreOffice for fonts, complex tables, RTL/Hebrew, and slide layouts. macOS only.

Office Render (macOS, real Microsoft Office)

Overview

To verify how a .docx/.pptx/.xlsx looks, render it with the installed Microsoft Office app, not LibreOffice. LibreOffice substitutes fonts and re-flows complex layouts — it renders a 3-across team grid as a vertical list and swaps the typeface, so what you "see" isn't what the user sees. Word/PowerPoint produce the exact, pixel-faithful page; then convert the PDF to images you can read.

Pipeline: Office file → (real Word/PowerPoint/Excel) → PDF → (pdftoppm) → page JPGs.

When to use

• "Show me / screenshot / preview this Word doc (or deck, or spreadsheet)."
• Visually QA a .docx/.pptx you just generated (python-docx, python-pptx) — confirm fonts, tables, images, and slide layout look right.
• A LibreOffice render looks wrong (substituted font, broken table/grid, RTL flipped) and you need the true rendering.
• Read a doc whose layout matters (not just text — for text, markitdown/pandoc is fine).

Skip when you only need the text (use pandoc -t plain / python -m markitdown), or you're not on macOS / Office isn't installed (fall back to soffice --headless --convert-to pdf, accepting lower fidelity).

Usage

uv run --with docx2pdf python3 ~/.claude/skills/office-render/scripts/office_render.py \
    "/path/to/file.pptx" --out /tmp/render --dpi 150

It writes file.pdf + file-1.jpg, file-2.jpg, … into --out and prints the paths. Then Read the JPGs. Options: --format png, --pdf-only, --dpi N (150 is plenty; the page is small on screen). Works for .docx, .pptx, .xlsx.

One page often has trailing whitespace — crop to content before placing it elsewhere (PIL: alpha/near-white bbox).

One-time setup (do this once, then it's silent)

Two separate macOS permissions are involved — and Full Disk Access on your terminal is NOT one of them (that confuses people):

1. Automation — lets the terminal control Office via Apple events. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation → enable Microsoft Word / PowerPoint / Excel under your terminal/IDE app (Terminal, iTerm, Ghostty, VS Code…). First run also pops a prompt — approve it once.

2. File access — Office apps are sandboxed and only read standard folders (Downloads, Documents, Desktop). Opening a file elsewhere (e.g. /tmp) pops a "Grant File Access" dialog and the convert fails. To use any path freely, give the Office apps themselves Full Disk Access: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → "+" → add /Applications/Microsoft Word.app (and PowerPoint, Excel). Note: FDA on the Office app, not the terminal. FDA only takes effect after the app is fully quit and relaunched — if Office was already open when you flipped the switch, the running instance never picked it up and keeps prompting; quit it once (⌘Q or killall "Microsoft PowerPoint"). The script quits the app before each run, so it relaunches with FDA. (It also auto-stages through ~/Downloads as a fallback if you skip FDA entirely.)

Gotchas (each one cost real debugging — they're baked into the script)

Symptom	Cause	Fix (in script)
Message not understood / "Grant File Access" dialog	Office sandbox can't read the file's folder (e.g. /tmp)	Give the Office app Full Disk Access, or keep files in Downloads/Documents/Desktop. Script auto-stages via ~/Downloads.
AppleEvent timed out (-1712)	PDF export slower than the default Apple-event timeout	Wrap the save in with timeout of 600 seconds (script does this).
Word: active document doesn't understand the "save as" message (-1708)	Word's AppleScript save as is broken on several builds	Use docx2pdf for .docx (it uses a path that works), not raw save as.
not allowed to send Apple events	Automation permission not granted	Approve the first-run prompt / enable it in the Automation pane (≠ Full Disk Access on the terminal).
Grid/table renders as a vertical list; wrong font	You used LibreOffice	Use this skill (real Office). LibreOffice ≠ faithful for complex layouts.

How it works (reference)

• .docx → PDF: docx2pdf (drives real Word). Raw AppleScript save as is unreliable per the table above.
• .pptx → PDF: osascript: save active presentation in (POSIX file PDF) as save as PDF inside with timeout.
• .xlsx → PDF: osascript: save active workbook in PDF as PDF file format (best-effort; spreadsheets paginate awkwardly — set print area in the file for clean output).
• PDF → images: pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 (poppler).

The script quits the target app first for a clean state, then converts, then renders. If a convert fails it retries once via ~/Downloads and reports the exact fix if it still fails.