I've been asked to write a php script that should read/parse a docx file and do some operations such as duplicate a specific paragraph/table and fill-in some variables (#myvar or $myvar) with values.
What do you guys recommand, use the word/document.xml file directly or convert the whole document to an HTML file and then parse it using DOM(I don't like this solution :( )?
the structure of the docx to parse is not defined yet, it's my job to do that ! And it has to be as general as possible.
To have a clear idea about what I'm doing, the docx file is a CV model that I have to fill-in with data from DB.
P.S: I don't know how to efficiently parse/modify the XML file using Xquery since the only solution I have is to use variables (plain text with $ or #..) inside that docx
thanks for your help :)
There are 2 major PHP libraries able to create Word documents. Here's a description of features from both that might help you solve your problem:
PHPWord (opensource) - allows to load template documents and replace values... take a look at this example in library's source code, maybe you can define a CV template and use this to work a solution out;
PHPDocX (free with basic features, paid for more advanced features) - allows templates and search and replace of content in documents (probably only in paid versions though).
This is a old question, but I thought I give some pointers as I have been struggling with this for some time and have ended up writing my own package at github: wrklst/docxmustache.
Here are some solutions I know of:
Free solutions:
https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPWord (as mentioned above, cumbersome and not very capable)
http://www.tinybutstrong.com/opentbs.php (works but is highly cumbersome, also introduces a lot of security issues if you plan to allow user supplied templates)
Partially Free and Paid:
https://www.phpdocx.com
http://www.docxpresso.com (looks like one of the more complete solutions to me, at 199 eur for a server license its not too expensive either)
https://modules.docxtemplater.com
I worked with opentbs quite a bit but I am not happy with it and I am currently trying to evaluate to write my own solution that is more geared to my specific needs. Generally you need:
- A zip calss to unzip/rezip the docx file
- A template engine to replace values, I am using mustache (https://github.com/bobthecow/mustache.php)
- If you are planning to replace images as well you need to more advanced file, reference and xml handling. Php's SimpleXMLElement should be sufficient to handle all the xml manipulation.
Off course you can always convert the docx into a more accessible format, but that will greatly mess with any styling. If thats not an issue I recommend to use libreoffice to convert your docx into any format that libreoffice supports. on linux based servers you can easily access it via command line, here an example with symfony for command execution:
$command = "soffice --headless --convert-to html ".$inputfile.' --outdir '.$outputfile.'/');
$process = new \Symfony\Component\Process\Process($command);
$process->start();
while ($process->isRunning()) {}
// executes after the command finishes
if (!$process->isSuccessful()) {
throw new \Symfony\Component\Process\Exception\ProcessFailedException($process);
}
Check out my package wrklst/docxmustache if you want to see this in context.
good luck!
is there any way how to covert PDF to HTML? I need a text from the file and when I tried PDFtoText library, I got the text, but unsorted and without any rules for parsing.
I noticed, that some PDFtoHTML online services works great with the file. So, any tips please? Here is the PDF file and I need only one specific row in the right column.
Try integrating the PDFtoHTML from the poppler project; that should support table recognition.
pdftohtml works fine : fast, stable but the html result is ugly at best. I have used it for quite some time for a web site that has many job resumes.
It is a good solution for extracting textual content however.
I would give the scribd API a try
http://www.scribd.com/developers/api
or the google apps document API. GOogle does a great job a displaying and converting pdf files
I'm looking for a hassle-free script that can convert an HTML file to Microsoft Word or PDF format. My download script works already, but when I tried to open the downloaded document in MS Word the images are labeled X, and it prompted for missing files.
Can you suggest any alternative?
Have a look at PrinceXML.
It's definitely the best HTML/CSS to PDF converter out there, although it's not free (But hey, your programming is not free either, so if it saves you 10 hours of work, you're home free.)
Oh yeah, did I mention that this is the first (and probably only) HTML2PDF solution that does full ACID2!?
http://princexml.com/samples/
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Is there any PHP PDF library that can replace placeholder variables in an existing PDF, ODT or DOCX document, and generate a PDF file as the end result, without screwing up the layout?
Requirements:
Needs no 3rd party web service
Ability to run on shared web hosting would be ideal (no binary installations / packages required)
Mind you, a library that is able to load an existing PDF file and insert text programmatically at a specific position is not enough for my use case.
As far as my research shows, there is no library that can do this:
TCPDF can only generate documents from scratch
FPDI can read existing PDF templates, but can only add contents programmatically (no template variable replacement)
There are various DOCX/ODT template libraries out there but they don't output PDF
PHPDOCx claims to be able to do exactly what I need - but they don't offer a trial version and I'm not going to buy a cat in a bag, especially not when there seems to be no other product on the web that does this. I find it hard to believe they can do this without problems - if you have successfully done this using the product, please drop a line here.
Am I overlooking something?
Is there a way to do this using PDF forms? I am creating the source documents in OpenOffice 3.
I may be able to use standard Linux commands (pdftk is available for example, trying that out right now.)
Update: *Argh!* I was called out of the office and the bounty expired in the meantime. Starting a new bounty: As far as my testing shows, no solution works for me perfectly yet.
Update II: I will be looking the pdftk approach soon, but I am also starting another bounty for one more round of collecting additional input. This question has now seen 1300 rep points in bounties, must be some kind of a record :)
This is not very practical, but for completeness: If you already have an ODT template, then you might very well retain that as template. Modifying the OpenDocument content.xml and replacing placeholders therein is pretty simple. If so, you could use unoconv or pyodconverter to transform the ODT into a final PDF.
unoconv -f pdf -o final.pdf template.odt
Very obviously this requires a full OpenOffice setup (UNO and Writer) on the webserver. And obviously not every webhoster would go with that! haha. Even if it's simple on any Debian or Fedora setup. The execution speed would probably not be stellar either. But then it might be the cleanest approach, since OOo governs both formats way better than any PHP class ever could.
Pekka,
I looked in to this previously, I think you can use pdftk (a command line utility), to fill in a PDF form using FDF/XFDF data files, which you could easily generate from within PHP. That was the best option I've seen so far, though there may well be a native library.
pdftk is quite useful in general, worth having a look at.
Update: Have a look here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.fdf.php
Have you considered using something like XSL:Formatting Objects (XSL:FO)? Basically they're XML documents that are processed and turned into PDFs. Doing string - or better, DOM - replacements within that should be pretty simple. It supports embedding images, links, annotations, etc.
It's not PHP but there are a number of PHP wrappers for it along with ways of using it via exec, etc. Not an ideal but it takes care of the template portion completely. For some more info: http://techportal.inviqa.com/2009/12/16/transforming-xml-with-php-and-xsl/
There's an implementation available as an Apache project - http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
fpdf and there is another extention on top of it, which I can't remember, which allows you to import templates
Your best bet would be to generate the entire document on the fly, with the template defined programatically using fpdf or something similar. That way, your text will not be cut off by paragraphs or anything like that, and you can easily position images/other elements as required.
Late, but you can use OpenSource template designer https://github.com/applicius/dhek/releases , to define pkaceholders/areas over any existing PDF, then load it in PHP (as it's JSON format) and write accordingly on original PDF using fpdf lib, to generate custom PDF with dynamic data written on.
Altough not exactly thing you asked, you may consider to make it at two steps: using some php templating sytem (smarty, dwoo) to generate html page and then using tools like Html2Pdf convert it to pdf. I am using it, and results are good (no problems with page layout etc)
Of course it depends of your input documents (can you use html instead of PDF/ ODT as source ) and complexity of the layout of those.
Ok I'm trying to help you solve the problem a little.
First the answer for couple of your question.
Q - Am I overlooking something?
A - No. There is a PHP PDF library that can replace placeholder variables in an existing PDF and generate a PDF file as the end result, without screwing up the layout
Q - Is there a way to do this using PDF forms?
A - Yes. absolutelly the tric to doing this is by using a PDF Forms
For both answer you can use Justin Koivisto fill pdf form field php library.
For more detail you please go to http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/tutorial.php.
Take a look there for additional information.
Credit to Justin Koivisto for his work
P.S
For workaround for displaying a table like output from pdf form
please consider to take some reading on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher User's Guide - Creating a PDF Template
I'll add this new answer since the FDF PHP extension is now dead.
I've just followed these instructions and ended up executing one perl script then the pdftk command
I'm pretty aware it's far from being a real PHP solution but it's reliable and fairly easy to implement on any *nix platform.
The tools described there are also available on Debian, just in case you were wondering.
It's a litte bit late but have a look at the PDFTemplate Library it does exatly what you want. You can create Open Document files (odt) and add placeholders in it. The PDFTemplate library can fill out these placeholders (even with images) and create a PDF file.
ODT Files with placeholders to PDF
I'm trying to find a way to search inside PDF files. I came accross the PHP PDF class but I can't seem to find any function for reading/searching a filestream.
So, as naive as I am, i tried to simple get a stream using file_get_contents(), obviously it's an encrypted-like output ;)
So my question, is there any way to search through PDF files? I'm looking for script-only / free / open source solutions and not buying some expensive commercial libraray.
XPDF?
There is a blog post here that may be of help.
There seems to be some code here that could help - a simple class that reads a PDF into plaintext. Unsure if it supports decryption.
There are also a number of resources in PHP documentation that may help you. Click.
FPDF and FPDI may also help. Probably your best bet after some research.**
A PHP search engine called Sphider has the option of adding PDF search via XPDF. You can then customise the result templates to fit in with the rest of your site (if applicable).