How would I make a webpage that would use user input to generate a .doc(x)/.pdf document /w footnotes?

Question

I want to create a website/webapp to aid users in making translations of foreign texts. The user would upload/copy & paste a text in one collumn, type in a translation on a second collumn. There would be a feature for the user to add notes about certain words, in such a way that when they hover over the word a popup appears with their notes.
The thing is, I want them to be able to download what they have done to some sort of word document, (doc, docx, odt, pdf) in such a way that they see the text on one side, the translation on the other, and notes appear as footnotes on the pages the text appears.
So I just need some guidance. I have experiance with html, css, javascript, php. I think I can get everything figured out myself, I just need to know if the 'generate word document' part is plausible?

Answer 1

For generating PDFs, you might want to check out LaTeX

Answer 2

Generating PDFs is pretty easy from any language and most languages have an easy to use library Here is one a found for PHP that will help you: link text

Generating Microsoft compatible word docs is a bit more work. For this I would recommend looking into OpenOffice and using its APIs or even via the command line to create .doc documents that are compatible with Microsoft work.

Answer 3

You sure can generate Word documents with ASP.Net. That's a popular website feature.

Here's two articles telling you how to do it step-by-step:

Microsoft Word Documents from ASP.NET

Dynamic Generation of Word Document Report in ASP.NET with HTML

You can also generate PDF documents easily:

Creating PDF documents in ASP.NET

I would recommend that you start out simple, and add complexity as you go. You'll be able to Google for more information as you go, or come to StackOverflow. Among the useful tags here would be "pdf-generation".