What's best way to get a user's Word doc converted to simple html and images?

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 by admin

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anybody has any experience of this.
Basically, I'm building a site for a guy and he keeps throwing tonnes of content my way, all Word docs with tables, images, etc.
The site is PHP / MySQL based and when it's handling text it's so easy to use. I want it to preserve formatting if possible and maybe where the images are (aligned left or right at the very least)

At the moment I have integrated a Javascript RTE (Rich Text Editor) called fckeditor, an earlier version of Ckeditor [ http://ckeditor.com/ ]

I think fckeditor is free for commercial projects and Ckeditor isn't (could be wrong but it doesn't matter too much to my main query anyhow)

So basically the user will have to copy in each block of text and then upload each image seperately and align it left or right or whatever, which is fine by me, but for the moment I need to put some of these docs in myself, and it can be very, very, time-consuming. I'm looking into ways to get his word documents up in the most automatic way possible.

Here are a few of my options

1. wvWare - wvware.sourceforge.net/
I'm not exactly sure how to install it but I do have a VPS so it should be at least possible. Does anybody have any experience using this ? I suppose the question I'm asking is: Does it work?

2. There are a few RTF to html converters here etc.: http://www.w3.org/Tools/Word_proc_filters.html
but nothing that seems to do the job for me so far. I'm afraid to start downloading them all and testing because I'm on a tight schedule here and I just need to know what will actually work for me.

3. I could ask the user to save the file as XML (he's bright enough) and then use simplexml to parse, but I'm having trouble finding any info on google about using simplexml to extract the image bits to files or whatever. Perhaps storing them in the MySQL database as binary is the best way but I'd prefer not to have the overhead if possible and just to save JPG or PNG files out and have the html link to them. Is there anybody out there that has done this before?

4. Maybe there's a client-side app for this ? Written in Java or Flash or something ???

5. Perhaps MHTML - I could get him to save as .MHT archive and then do something with PHP on the server side - if I can't find any other solution I will probably try this one next.



So does anybody know of the best option for this or should I stick with the Rich text editor road ?

Any alternative (that works and is relatively easy for the client to do) is fine.

Thanks