How do you display a formatted Word Doc in HTML/PHP?

Question

What is the best way to display a formatted Word Doc in HTML/PHP?

Here is the code I currently have but it doesn't format it:

$word = new COM("word.application") or die ("Could not initialise MS Word object.");
$word->Documents->Open(realpath("ACME.doc"));

// Extract content.
$content = (string) $word->ActiveDocument->Content;

echo $content;

$word->ActiveDocument->Close(false);

$word->Quit();
$word = null;
unset($word);

Solution 1

I know nothing about COM, but poking around the Word API docs on MSDN, it looks like your best bet is going to be using Document.SaveAs to save as wsFormatFilteredHTML to a temporary file, then serving that HTML to the user. Be sure to pick the filtered HTML, otherwise you're going to get the soupiest tag soup ever.

Solution 2

I figured this out. Check out the solution to reading a Word Doc and formatting it in HTML:

$filename = "ACME.doc";
$word = new COM("word.application") or die ("Could not initialise MS Word object.");
$word->Documents->Open(realpath($filename));

$new_filename = substr($filename,0,-4) . ".html";

// the '2' parameter specifies saving in txt format
// the '6' parameter specifies saving in rtf format
// the '8' parameter specifies saving in html format
$word->Documents[1]->SaveAs("C:/a1/projects/---full path--- /".$new_filename,8);
$word->Documents[1]->Close(false);
$word->Quit();
//$word->Release();
$word = NULL;
unset($word);

$fh = fopen($new_filename, 'r');
$contents = fread($fh, filesize($new_filename));
echo $contents;
fclose($fh);
//unlink($new_filename);

Couple of things... Having "charset=UTF-8" at the top of my PHP page was adding a bunch of diamonds with questions marks... I deleted that and it works perfectly.

Also, the SaveAs has to have the full path, at least locally, I added that to get it to work.

Thanks again for your help.