converting word to HTML

sfullman

Hi,

I did a search and nothing really matched what I am trying to do. 'd like to take either a Word or Word Perfect Document which has simple formatting and tables, and convert it into HTML. I don't like Word's native conversion because it's WAY to bloated.

Is there anything that will do this on a Linux box using php? I guess another approach would be a link to standards for interpreting and parsing (provided it's not passworded) a MS Word file. Can anyone help with this?

thanks.
Sam

planetsim

Unless you can find a PHP Module that will read the Word File (I have never found any not even a Perl one) this is basically impossible for now, you could create one using plain PHP to read the Word Format however itd would be rather slow.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by sfullman
... standards for interpreting and parsing (provided it's not passworded) a MS Word file.

I don't know about "standards" - Microsoft prefers to keep Word's file format closed "for security reasons" (read: security of Microsoft's market share); but there are probably reverse-engineered specifications for different versions about. There must be, or Sun won't be able to provide support for Word in OpenOffice.org 🙂 (can that be used in an analogous fashion on Linux? One page I bumped into Googling this this, which suggests the answer is "yes".) www.wotsit.org I think might have a few notes.

sethadam1

The answer is simply no.

Word files in doc format are binary files, not plain text. You'll need something that can actually break down the file format, because you can't simply fread() or fets() through it. Anyway, PHP does NOT sound like the right tool for the job. I'd expect that to be a Python or C or C++ application. You could just used OpenOffice.org.

If you need to do this to a large number of documents, don't waste your time, go get Office 2003 and just export to HTML (simple) (or whatever it's called...something like that). The newer versions of Office don't make such a mess of the markup. Plus, you can save in XML (WordML) and then just write a nice WordML parser, which you COULD write in PHP.

If you're serious, and not just doing this for fun or for something pointless, you need to read up on Microsoft's file formats. If you can pull this off, you'd have a viable commercial application on your hands.

sneakyimp

this project here at phpbuilders.com purports to convert ms office docs to pdf....maybe it has some kind of secret?

http://www.phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=1149

worst case...convert from word to pdf and from pdf to html?

i have no idea if this would work.

sethadam1

Originally posted by sneakyimp
this project here at phpbuilders.com purports to convert ms office docs to pdf....maybe it has some kind of secret?

http://www.phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=1149

worst case...convert from word to pdf and from pdf to html?

i have no idea if this would work.

No secret - the project uses COM objects, which are built-in Windows APIs, and PDF/PS print drivers which "print" the document to PDF or PostScript. The original post, as I read it, wanted to PARSE the Word file, that is, manipulate parts of it like an XML file, which, as I see it, isn't doable with PHP. Note that this project actually uses the Ghostscript executable (written in C, I believe) and COM, which is available in PHP for Windows, but not expressly within PHP.

I could be proven wrong by a savvy programmer, but for the sake of being concise, I'll say this shouldn't -- maybe even can't -- be done simply with vanilla PHP.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by sethadam1
The original post, as I read it, wanted to PARSE the Word file, that is, manipulate parts of it like an XML file

I read it as the original poster wanting to convert Word documents to HTML. sneakyimp's suggestion is unusable because a Linux host is specified. Like I said, I strongly suspect that OpenOffice could do it (but only suspect, because I've yet to attempt anything of the sort).

planetsim

The problem with this from both sides your really limiting yourself. One side you can use COM however that is a Windows only thing, on the other hand something that may just work is with Open Office and it does actually work not sure on the commandline aspect (very interesting ill try it one day), however having Open Office on a server is going to be a long shot, I doubt a host would install it unless your on a dedicated server then you could do it yourself.

Im wondering why from all this time there isnt even a perl Module for this (well any that ive looked for) that could be ported for PHP to be a module (only excel at the moment).

sethadam1

If openoffice had(has?) a command line utility, you could create .sxw files from your .doc files, then gunzip them. Inside .sxw files (or anything that uses the Oasis format, if I'm understanding) is just some xml and presentation. Inside it, you'll find files called content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml, and settings.xml. They could be parsed by PHP 5's awesome simple XML handlers and you could generate not only (X)HTML, but you could further mark it up and/or add your own styles.

That would be an AWESOME and powerful PHP utility, a way to use the openoffice converter to specify an input .doc file and ultimately have access to content.xml.