Desperate! MS Office Doc Thumbnails

redthor

Hi,
(We're desperately trying to find a solution to this challenging one!)

Is it possible to extract the saved thumbnail bitmap from a Word (or any office document) on Linux-Apache-PHP platform?

In the COM world it's IExtractImage - wondering if it can be done on Linux...

Background information:
In Microsoft Office files there's an option in File -> Properties to 'Save Preview Picture' which creates a small bitmap that can be seen in Windows explorer when in the Thumbnail view mode.

If anyone has any possible pointers/ideas I'd greatly appreciate it. (COM-C++ bridge/ImageMagick/wvWare something!)

Thanks in advance,
r

olaf

I'm not sure how it works on Linux, but the best way to "rescue" a photo from word is to resize the photo in word to 100% and then copy paste to your photo editor...

redthor

olaf wrote:
I'm not sure how it works on Linux, but the best way to "rescue" a photo from word is to resize the photo in word to 100% and then copy paste to your photo editor...

Hi Olaf,
Thank you for your response.

However we're actually trying to display, in our website, the thumbnails that Microsoft Office create's automatically when you select "Save preview picture". This thumbnail is saved within the document file (but not actually within the document text).

Then, when a user chooses View -> Thumbnails in Windows File Explorer they will get this thumbnail.

We would like this functionality in our PHP website.

I attach some images to describe (a) the properties setting in MS Office and (b) the view in Windows file Explorer.

Thanks,
r

olaf

... after working more then 10 years with word I must I never saw this feature before.

According my information is a word file a binary file, right?

how to you want to extract the image from the file? And I think that this thumb function is not a part of rtf...

redthor

olaf wrote:
... after working more then 10 years with word I must I never saw this feature before.

According my information is a word file a binary file, right?

how to you want to extract the image from the file? And I think that this thumb function is not a part of rtf...

This is a feature of all Office documents as far as I can make out - Excel (xls), Visio (vsd), etc.

I believe a word file is a binary file, yes.

Well, I thought that someone may have extracted it before. wvWare understands the format of a Word file so perhaps it could extract it - but I haven't seen this and this is only for Word whereas I would like a solution for all office documents.

Perhaps there is some sort of wrapper someone has written to access the file like Windows does to extract the image.

You can see how it's done on the Windows platform here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/shareptthum.asp

-r

justsomeone

It's an interesting challenge!

I have to say that I was never aware of this Word feature either, and wasn't able to locate any useful looking options during a (brief) web search.

Are you in an environment where you can mix and match toolsets?

For instance, if you're running on a Windows environment, could you create a command line app to display the image, and then call that app from within PHP?

Or could you create an ASP web service to do the job for you and call that from your PHP?

Alternatively, if no-one else has actually done this already, ou might just have to roll your sleeves up and attempt to reverse engineer the .doc file to extract the thumbnail.

redthor

Hi There,
No, unforunately we're not running a Windows environment nor able to create an ASP web service.

The .doc file format is specified here: http://www.wotsit.org/
But we're looking for a solution that includes xls and possibly pdf documents as well.

What would be the first steps people could recommend if we were to build it ourselves?

Weedpacket

Well, wotsit doesn't have the "specification" - Microsoft keeps that secret because they don't want competitors to make products that can read Office-created documents - especially on non-Microsoft systems - without going through Microsoft's API. What wotsit provides are what people have reverse-engineered or obtained regarding old versions.

For Adobe's PDF format you may be in better luck; do a search for Ghostscript (I forget the URL); a Google search for a term like "pdf2txt" will no doubt find something as well.

redthor

Rather than a specification - is there some way in which we can mimic the COM world in Linux and then just call the IExtractImage method? Perhaps someone from wine or the like would have an idea?

Threehearts

hi there.

about the only way i can think of to get this work is to get asp or something reasonablely .com like running on your webserver...
i know of a perl mod that does that, but i dont know how good it is or whether it works at all... a friend of mine experimented with it and got basic asp functions running...

search for "asp" on www.cpan.org.

hope that helps.

jakob

jsim

There is a number of products in the web (some free, some commercial) that read Excel files in linux.

The best results gives ExcelExplorer from EEPHP.com and I know that developers of this product already solve the problems reading images from Excel file plus thumbnails of the files.
Unfortunately this will be in the next version that in testing now and will be available in a 1-2 weeks.

Funny that it can read thumbnails from other MS office documents, like Word (doc).

P.S. If you interested I can ask to put online demo of the next version at some url on this site