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 --no-project --with docx2pdf python3 ~/.claude/skills/office-render/scripts/office_render.py \
    "/path/to/file.pptx" --out /tmp/render --dpi 150

--no-project is not optional cosmetics: without it, uv run tries to install the surrounding directory as a project, and if the CWD (or any parent) holds a pyproject.toml with no [project] table — common in tool-only repos — it aborts with No 'project' table found before the script ever runs. --no-project tells uv to just build an ephemeral env from --with and ignore whatever project it's sitting inside. Harmless when there's no pyproject either, so always pass it.

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

Only one permission is required — Full Disk Access is NOT needed (the script sidesteps the file-access sandbox entirely; see below):

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 — handled automatically, nothing to do. Office apps are sandboxed and only freely read the standard folders (Downloads, Documents, Desktop); opening a file elsewhere would pop a "Grant File Access" powerbox. This script avoids that by always running the Office app inside ~/Downloads — it copies INPUT there, exports the PDF there, then moves the PDF to --out with Python (which isn't sandboxed). So the powerbox never appears no matter where your files live or whether PowerPoint is already open, without Full Disk Access. (Optional: if you manually drive Office against arbitrary paths outside this script, granting the Office apps Full Disk Access avoids the powerbox there too — but this script doesn't need it.)

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

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 copies the input into ~/Downloads/.office-render, quits the target app for a clean state, converts there (so the sandbox never prompts), then moves the PDF to --out and renders it. If the convert fails it reports the exact fix (usually a missing Automation permission).

It will not quit an app that has documents open. Quitting runs quit saving no, which would throw away the user's unsaved work in any deck or document they have open. If the app has documents open (or won't say how many), the script stops and says so: ask the user to save and close them, or pass --force-quit only when losing unsaved changes is acceptable.