On a production web server I have to produce letters based on a template I got in MS-Word binary format. I use PHP and for the search and replace task I found PHPWord, which can handle Docx files, so I converted the template to OpenXML on my local workstation. Unfortunately the output also is Docx.
The goal is to produce a single PDF for the user to download so she can print out a bunch of letters at once very easily.
Now I need to find a way to either:
- Search and replace text in a PDF file
- Convert Docx to PDF without loss of formatting
- Edit the original Doc template without loss of formatting and without using COM
- Convert Docx to Doc without loss of formatting (which seems nearly impossible for the template looks good in word but technically how the formatting is done is a big pile of...) so I could convert it using wvPDF
What I don't want to use besides OpenOffice.org are web services. I'm aware of PHPLiveDocx but I don't want to depend on an external service for performance, availability, security reasons. Also buying a piece of software isn't an option in this case (can't influence that).
Running on a public facing web server I don't want to pull OpenOffice.org - not even headless, as it will pull around 160MB of compressed(!) binaries and best practice is not no load binaries you don't really need on a public facing server. Though it's a last resort to use oo.o I want to make sure I have ruled out any other options there may have been.
The host OS is CentOS 5.5.
Where can I go from here?
Regards, luxifer