The first release
It was about a year back that I was tasked to extract images from Microsoft Office binary files (xls, doc and ppt) and display them in a Node JS application. I found the specification documents online but it was a nightmare to go through, understand and then write Javascript code to extract the data that I needed. These binary formats are divided into records and there is no good document that describes it clearly. There are some npm packages but they offer little help as they solve a specific problem e.g. reading worksheet data. The most challenging part was to look at the specification document and then trace that record in the binary data using the hexadecimal record signature, then count the bytes to identify different fields inside that record. I was using the Visual Studio Code editor so I used the hex viewer extensions (mainly the hexdump) for this purpose but I always found them lacking features like tagging certain bytes so I can come back to it later. That's when I thoug...