Using SP's document rendering engine in a 3rd party utility

Question

New to the community. Wondering if it's possible to call SP's document rendering engine from a third party utility.

What I'd like to do is call it from my application, so that I can take a MS Word Document or a PDF or whatever, and then use the HTML/CSS that SharePoint creates to display the document nicely.

Seems like something that might be possible, but I don't know a lot about SharePoint. Can anybody help?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If by "...SP's document rendering engine..." you mean Office Web Apps then I think the short answer is no, there is no direct/supported API:

How can i extend Office Web Apps?.

However, in theory I don't see why you couldn't use an iframe to embed the "edit in browser" experience into a custom application (assuming the URL was correct). SharePoint's OOTB Page Viewer web part is often used for this purpose.