High-quality PDF to Word conversion in PHP?

Question

What's the best way of converting PDF docs to Microsoft Word format in PHP? This can be either as a PHP script or calling a (Linux) executable (with proc_open()). It just needs to be relatively fast and produce quality Word documents (in 97/2000/2003 format).

Commercial software is OK.

Answer 1

To read PDF files, you will need to install the XPDF package, which includes "pdftotext." Once you have XPDF/pdftotext installed, you run the following PHP statement to get the PDF text:

content = shell_exec('/usr/local/bin/pdftotext '.$filename.' -');

After getting the content, Download PHPDOCX Community version, try like this.

<?php
require_once '../../classes/CreateDocx.inc';

$docx = new CreateDocx();
$textInfo = $content;

$paramsTextInfo = array(
    'val' => 1,
    'i' => 'single',
    'sz' => 8
);

$docx->addText($textInfo, $paramsTextInfo);

$docx->createDocx('report.docx');
?>

Answer 2

Openoffice has a PDF import extension. Most of OpenOffice is scriptable, so you should be able to write a command line interface to perform the conversion. There are many examples on the official UNO wiki.

Answer 3

By far the easiest way is with phpLiveDocx. It can load DOC, DOCX and RTF and save to PDF. It can be downloaded from http://www.phplivedocx.org/articles/brief-introduction-to-phplivedocx/ The download file contains a large number of sample applications, which illustrate all aspects of the PHP5 library. Leo