Aspose.Words.FOSS 26.2.0

Aspose.Words FOSS for .NET

Open-source .NET library for Word documents, built from the genuine Aspose.Words codebase — the same document engine that has processed Word documents in production since 2003, carefully reduced to a free edition. Create, read, and edit DOCX, convert to Markdown and plain text. No Microsoft Word required.

Licensed under MIT: free for commercial and personal use, no license keys, no evaluation watermarks.

Installation

dotnet add package Aspose.Words.FOSS

Or via the NuGet Package Manager console:

Install-Package Aspose.Words.FOSS

Quick example

using Aspose.Words;

// Create a document from scratch.
Document doc = new Document();
DocumentBuilder builder = new DocumentBuilder(doc);
builder.ParagraphFormat.StyleIdentifier = StyleIdentifier.Heading1;
builder.Writeln("Hello from Aspose.Words FOSS!");
doc.Save("Hello.docx");

// Convert an existing document to Markdown.
new Document("Report.docx").Save("Report.md");

The API is source-compatible with the commercial Aspose.Words for .NET, so the official documentation largely applies within the supported feature set.

What it can do

• Create documents from scratch with the full document object model or the high-level DocumentBuilder.
• Read and edit existing DOCX files: text, formatting, styles, tables, lists, sections, headers/footers, bookmarks, comments, footnotes, shapes.
• Convert between DOCX, Markdown, and plain text.
• Append, clone, and import content between documents; find and replace with regex; inspect, accept, or reject tracked changes; update fields; protect documents; round-trip DOCM/DOTM with VBA intact; verify digital signatures.

Supported formats: DOCX / DOCM / DOTX / DOTM / Flat OPC (load and save), Markdown (load and save), plain text (load and save).

Targets and dependencies

On Linux, also add the SkiaSharp.NativeAssets.Linux package (standard SkiaSharp practice — native binaries for Linux ship separately).

What's not included

To keep this edition free, the subsystems that power Aspose's commercial offering were removed. To be upfront about it:

• Page layout and rendering: no saving to PDF, XPS, or images, and no printing. Layout-dependent field values (page numbers in a TOC, NUMPAGES) evaluate to 0.
• Additional formats: DOC, RTF, ODT, HTML, EPUB and others are not read or written.
• Mail merge, LINQ Reporting, document comparison, creating digital signatures, embedded-font subsetting.
• On the cross-platform targets, WMF/EMF metafiles cannot be rasterized to bitmaps (the net462 GDI+ path handles this).

The boundary is not set in stone — if a feature you need sits on the wrong side of it, open an issue. Where there is real demand, we will consider opening up more of the code. If you need everything today, the commercial Aspose.Words for .NET has it all, and because this library is that codebase, upgrading is essentially swapping the package reference.

Build from source

The full source, including the test suite, is on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/aspose-words-foss/Aspose.Words-FOSS-for-.NET.git
cd Aspose.Words-FOSS-for-.NET
dotnet build Aspose.Words.sln -c Release

This produces the same assemblies the package ships (plus per-assembly outputs for debugging). Run the test suite with dotnet test Aspose.Words.Tests/Aspose.Words.Tests.csproj -c Debug.

Issues and support

Found a bug or need a feature? Open an issue — bug reports with a reproducing document are especially appreciated. Pull requests are considered case by case; for anything non-trivial, open an issue first to discuss the approach.

If the library is useful to you, a star on GitHub helps others discover it.

License

MIT. Free for commercial and personal use.