PHP Generating Word Documents

[Anon]

Hi,

is it possible to generate word documents using PHP.

These Word Documents will have several styles applied to the text.

Is this possible, and if so... how (or a link to a good tutorial online) do you do it?

If not, is RTF the solution and if so... how (or a link to a good tutorial online) do you do it?

Jeroen Keppens

[Anon]

PHP generates HTML, and images if GD is enabled, never heard of it generating Word documents, as they are completely different, for a start its trying to use a piece of open source software to generate files normally created by a Microsoft product, just sounds unlikely to me.

You can of course generate the text in styles etc... in HTML and then someone can cut and copy it off the page.

No idea on RTF.

[Anon]

Theoretically PHP should be able to generate any kind of files, including Word documents.

The problem is in finding the format for word documents.
Once you have that, you can make word docs.
(like Jpeg images, once you know how....)

There are a few non-php tools out there (I forget where) that can transform ascii texts into word format, but they're bound to be limited.

[Anon]

RTF is very nearly a dead format, but here is a link to Microsoft's RTF documentation:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/specs/rtfspec.htm

I figured out what happens to people at Microsoft who eat soup with a fork. They're assigned to maintain Microsoft's developer Web site.

[Anon]

With a bit of hacking (by saving to RTF from Word) and looking at the Specs I have come up with this as a basic RTF document. I have also played around a bit with the paragraph tags for justification and indentation. Depending on how complex you want the documents to be, you may not need a heck of a lot of coding.

Here the basic document I started with,

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1
\pard\plain
\fs20
{\lang1033 This will be a basic RTF document.\par }
}

I put it on separate lines so I could see how the tagging levels worked. It can be one long stream separated by spaces though. Here is the basic 3 line document I was playing with. It has some formatting in the paragraphs and font size changes,

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1
\pard\plain
\fs20
{\lang1033 This will be a basic RTF document.\par }
\pard\plain
\fs24\qj
{\lang1033 This will be a basic RTF document.\par }
\pard\plain
\fs30\qj\fi720
{\lang1033 This will be a basic RTF document.\par }
}

I hope I get some time to fiddle with this some more. It could become a lifesaver. Now, anyone know how to make Excel docs on the fly? 🙂

Tim Frank

[Anon]

If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you have to love www.wotsit.org for file formats. Take a look at:

http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=text

Using info from wotsit.org, I have PHP4 code which converts database result sets into native file formats for M$ Excel (.XLS), Lotus 1-2-3 (.WK1), dBase (.DBF), WordPerfect (.WP5), CSV, HTML, XML, and so on. I originally developed the routines in C and FORTRAN, then ported the code over after learning PHP.

I looked at doing Word (.DOC), but didn't have enough justification for it at the time. If there is enough interest, I could look into writing a package for outputting native binary Word documents.

FYI... I'm currently on vacation until 1/4/2001, so e-mail replies may not be prompt.

-- Michael
[e-mail]
Darkstreak Consulting & Innovations
www.darkstreak.com

[Anon]

Instead of dumping in the binary format of Word or RTF... what I would try is doing some converting from Word 2000 Docs to HTML and studying the "round-trip" XML stuff they throw in. (I remember that the namespace is "o", so most of the tags begin '<o:' ). Since PHP has no problem at all with XML and HTML, all you really have to do is generate a page similar in style to the HTML doc with "round-trip" XML. Heck, IIRC, once a document has that stuff in it, Internet Explorer (5+) will even have the Edit With button on the toolbar show the Word icon by default, even if the user doesn't use Word as their default HTML editor.

Hope that helps, and isn't too hard to read,
--WorldMaker--

[Anon]

tnx all!

I went with the RTF-solutions and it's just great.

(fyi: I need it to create Word documents from XML-pages... word pages that can be downloaded by the end-user)

Jeroen

[Anon]

hi,
Can i see the sample code for rtf generation??

regs
ashish.

Jeroen wrote:

tnx all!

I went with the RTF-solutions and it's just great.

(fyi: I need it to create Word documents from XML-pages... word pages that can be downloaded by the end-user)

Jeroen

[Anon]

I didn't understand the last message .....apart from..'where can i make Excell files on the fly'...i know the answer to this:

http://phpclasses.upperdesign.com/browse.html/package/86/

& another
http://home.arcor.de/cnovak/

I found a class for word 97 there too....it says it requires winNT...but im gonna give it a shot anyway for win 95 + php4

http://phpclasses.upperdesign.com/browse.html/file/850/

[Anon]

If you know how...
Please put some of example code here...

TNX 🙂