Convert from Office Docs / PDFS to HTML

Question

I am currently working on a project where I need to secure access to downloadable files. The solution I want to implement is to have two buttons next to each document. One that says Editable and the other read-only (depending on the users permission they will see one of these or both). The editable will work normally with the browser dialogue opening to say open / save the document. That is the easy part. The read-only button needs to open the document without caching anything (in temporary internet files) on the client's machine for security reasons or give the ability to save it to their local machine.

The best Idea I have for this is to convert the document to HTML on the fly and then redirect the user to this page. We can then turn caching off on the site so the HTML isn't cached (I know they can then right-click and save the HTML or copy the text,etc.. but that is deemed acceptable).

Does anyone have an alternative solution than this (or have an easy way this can be achieved)?

I don't want to install Office on the web server or pay heavily for a third-party tool like Aspose.

Can anyone recommend any ideas?

Answer 1

Instead of converting , create a new aspx file on the fly and render or necessary contents there. You could use CMS for that, that will require some more coding stuffs if you dont want to go for 3rd party stuffs.

Answer 2

Docman Plugin for Joomla should work with this.

joomla supports permissions, i have done something similar in the past just it was slightly more basic.