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);

Answer 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.