I have been looking for some time now, and I decided to try some crowd sourcing.
I have searched (Googled) the answer and looked through Stack Overflow for some time now, and I cannot find a proper and relatively easy way of created DOCX documents via Perl.
I want to create a DOC file, and since DOCX is XML based, I was guessing that would be an easier way to achieve this.
I located a RTF::Writer module but its very limited in its capabilities.
There are more than one such library for PHP, and other languages, but I cannot use that, unfortunately.
I am not running on a Windows environment so I cannot use anything that would integrate with Office, in addition I don't want to start bundling Office with my product.
I am open to suggestions, but please provide sensible ones :) i.e. no, you are scr*wed DOCX is impossible.
Here is what I tried: 1) Take an existing DOCX, and modify the XML directly, all I achieved via this is caused Word to crash :) apparently Word is very sensitive on its attribute order
2) Googled for answers and I found some, like Win32::Word::Writer which only works on Windows and requires OLE and Office
3) Found a lot of posts from 2010, that say its impossible, well almost 4 years have passed, probably something is out there that can do it
4) Looked for commercial solutions, couldn't find one, I found FOP which is able to create RTF, which is pretty close, but it lacks a lot of the styling I would like to use
5) A lot of things (code and modules) that allow extracting data from DOCX, but nothing that can create one, weird
6) Found abandoned code like OpenOffice::OODoc which stopped being written in 2010, and of course requires OpenOffice to be installed, and potentially also requires a non-headless (i.e. requires a GUI system)
Thanks guys for any answers :}