How can i convert a php page into .doc file with php

Question

Recently i worked in a project. On this project I need convert page into a Microsoft word document (.doc file) and offer the document for download, all using PHP. But I can't solve this problem.

Please help me. Thank You very much, Arif

Answer 1

This is not easy to solve.

First off, if you want to write real word documents, you will have to do on Windows. You can use COM to talk to Word and this is how you manage to get good results. I've tried all the unix/linux based solutions and the results were not so great.

Otherwise, I'd suggest you write RTF -- which is just as good. And in the end, you can call the .rtf-file, .doc and no one will notice it. RTF has a couple limitations (formatting), but on the flipside -- it's all ASCII and the RTF standard is pretty comprehensive and well documented.

There's a class which does it pretty nicely -- phpLiveDocx (this is a great introduction). And this class also claims to write PDF and DOC -- but I haven't tried those yet. I use another solution for PDF.

Answer 2

I would recommend using the RTF format instead of the .doc - it's much simpler to write to, and all text editors understand it. Similar recommendation for .csv when you want to output an Excel file.

Answer 3

Perhaps not the answer you seek, but still interesting to note, there is a open source word processor out there called abiword that has a CLI (Command Line Interface). You can use it to easily convert between document formats. I know that at least one website uses it to convert text files into various formats.

It is actively getting developed and could easily be used as a 3de party black box solution to converting documents server side.

Here is a blog from one of the developers on how to integrate it with PHP

Server-Side AbiWord

abiword home page