Whats the available solutions for PHP to create word document in linux environment?
10 Answers
real Word documents
If you need to produce "real" Word documents you need a Windows-based web server and COM automation. I highly recommend Joel's article on this subject.
fake HTTP headers for tricking Word into opening raw HTML
A rather common (but unreliable) alternative is:
header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-word");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=document_name.doc");
echo "<html>";
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=Windows-1252\">";
echo "<body>";
echo "<b>Fake word document</b>";
echo "</body>";
echo "</html>"
Make sure you don't use external stylesheets. Everything should be in the same file.
Note that this does not send an actual Word document. It merely tricks browsers into offering it as download and defaulting to a .doc file extension. Older versions of Word may often open this without any warning/security message, and just import the raw HTML into Word. PHP sending sending that misleading Content-Type header along does not constitute a real file format conversion.
OpenOffice templates + OOo command line interface.
- Create manually an ODT template with placeholders, like [%value-to-replace%]
- When instantiating the template with real data in PHP, unzip the template ODT (it's a zipped XML), and run against the XML the textual replace of the placeholders with the actual values.
- Zip the ODT back
- Run the conversion ODT -> DOC via OpenOffice command line interface.
There are tools and libraries available to ease each of those steps.
May be that helps.
By far the easiest way to create DOC files on Linux, using PHP is with the Zend Framework component phpLiveDocx.
From the project web site:
"phpLiveDocx allows developers to generate documents by combining structured data from PHP with a template, created in a word processor. The resulting document can be saved as a PDF, DOCX, DOC or RTF file. The concept is the same as with mail-merge."
The Apache project has a library called POI which can be used to generate MS Office files. It is a Java library but the advantage is that it can run on Linux with no trouble. This library has its limitations but it may do the job for you, and it's probably simpler to use than trying to run Word.
Another option would be OpenOffice but I can't exactly recommend it since I've never used it.
There are 2 options to create quality word documents. Use COM to communicate with word (this requires a windows php server at least). Use openoffice and it's API to create and save documents in word format.
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