Convert Word File

[dis5085]

I was wondering if there is any software that is already loaded on the servers that would allow one to convert a word file. I want to upload a word file and then convert them to pdf files and email them out as an attachment or embed them for newsletter purposes. This way i can archive the files and list them on the website but also send it out at the same time.

This is for people that are not real technical so I want to make it simple. Let them use the software they are used to and convert it so that is works best for the internet.

[AndrewT]

There isn't anything on our servers that can do this. I'd imagine that it wouldn't even be easily feasible to do that via PHP/Perl. Having said that, I've never looked into PDF related scripting, so if you find anything please let us know.

[dis5085]

Anti-word

Is it possible to load this?

http://www.winfield.demon.nl/#Programmer

Just wondering.

[AndrewT]

That software is very old and quite honestly is not something that we would ever trust to put on our servers. To be perfectly honest, conversion of files is not something that we really like to have run on web hosting servers to begin with. It can easily create excess strain on server performance that really is getting away from its intended purpose. Having said that, we take suggestions all the time and are happy to look into them if you have them.

[Frank Hagan]

There are quite a few open source, free PDF creators out there that operate like "printers" in Windows applications. See pdfCreator at http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=57796 for one example.

There are PHP classes that can create PDF files on the fly ... Google "php PDF creator" for links to several. Even if you did spring for the programming it might end up being too resource heavy to run in a shared environment. So I would opt to point the users toward the PDF creator software they can install in their Windows programs.

[dis5085]

Thanks Andrew and Frank,

I was just hoping for a good clean solution to my problem. A lot of the missionaries are not very computer literate and I was hoping to just allow them to upload a file they were accustomed to. This way I could do the rest of the work and it would be easier on each party. I think I am just going to put a fix a word processor type entry box and create a pdf from it when they hit submit. Thanks for the suggestions.

Garland

[Pedja]

You have pretty simple solution. Make them use Open Office. It can opet MS Word document and it has PDF creation option built in. It maybe run by button in main toolbar, so ven illiterate can use it.

[Frank Hagan]

Actually, Open Office (from openoffice.org) is a great solution for missionaries; open source (free!), fully supported, with large and active user groups out there that can assist them if they need help. Its actually what I use on my home computer now.

[ZYV]

I'd like to second Frank. I also use OpenOffice 2 on CentOS 5 Linux on my desktop computer and laptops, and I also find that's certainly a great solution for home/charity/small office users with limited bugdet.

[J-G]

I THIRD that

Open office RULES! Its ability to create .PDF files is icing on the cake, but a necessity in your case, it appears.

[dis5085]

The problem is that they have word on their personal computers. The problem is server side conversion not local side.

[james]

I would also like to know if it's possible to convert the document server side.

I understand that it may not be possible in a shared hosting environment, but I'd still like to know if it is possible.

Also, if anyone knows how to convert a word document to HTML (and removing all the annoying word HTML code), then that would be great too.

Thanks.

[Frank Hagan]

Word to HTML? I know you can do it in PHP (Google "word to html php" and you get some hits). The problem with the ones I've seen is that the Word doc formats change quite a bit over the years, so the programming gets pretty complex.

I think MS SharePoint Servers can do it natively. But I don't know of any other pre-programmed, CMS type system to do it, and I think that's what you guys are looking for. There is wvWare, a library that includes an executable to do it and would run under Linux, at http://wvware.sourceforge.net/, but I don't know if anyone has adapted that one into a PHP script that allows uploads, etc. They have their demo disabled due to "security concerns". I suspect it would be too easy to upload an executable, since Word files are full of them.

They have an info page at http://wvware.sourceforge.net/wvInfo.html that describes some of the problems in trying to convert Word files ... including that "fast save" files are in a slightly different format.

It will be far easier to have them make the PDF file locally and then upload that (for the PDF file stuff), or live with the non-standard coding in a Word/HTML format file.

[Frank Hagan]

Ooops, I spoke too soon ... Plone has a convert routine:

http://plone.org/products/arofficetransforms

Plone is a python CMS script; not sure of the server requirements or whether it would work well here. We have python available (the included Mailman runs on it), but sometimes you need root access with python scripts. You would need a dedicated server for that.

Some of the other CMS may also have this functionality.

[ZYV]

dis5085

You can try to write a PHP/Perl wrapper around "nice -n ... AbiWord --to=pdf", but that will require you to compile AbiWord on RHEL4 first but then I am not sure how much ressources a conversion would consume and how much conversions do you have per day => I mean it might influence shared server's performance.