PHPDOCX is a PHP library that allows its client code to generate Microsoft Word documents in the .docx format from PHP scripts. PHP is increasingly being used for disparate goals and has to deal with data that comes from strange sources and has to be produced in stranger formats. An off-the-shelf solution for the creation of Word documents from an arbitrary source — being it a database, Excel or a csv file — is indeed a good tool to keep at hand.

Starting with the 1.5 version, which has been released on July 12th, PHPDOCX is now compatible with PHP 5.3. The adoption of PHP 5.3 from operating systems is growing and it will at last replace the previous versions of PHP also in the servers of hosting providers.

Features

PHPDOCX provides some standard features that you would commonly use when generating a document dynamically: managing text, list, tables, images and graphic elements are all basic operations of document editing.

There are more useful features included in the library, which come handy when dealing with long documents. For instance, insertion of headers, footers, page numbering, and table of contents are all supported.

A final note on the feature list is the possibility of outputting PDF and HTML from a given Word document. The library is intended for generation of reports and being able to switch the output format at will is a great point.

Technicalities

PHPDOCX has no requirements for a functional version of MS Word, except for generating legacy versions of the documents (.doc format for Word 2004 or before).

The library does requires the zip and xsl PHP extension to work, but they are probably already installed on your server of choice, or available at will. Apart from that, a generic installation of PHP and Apache will suffice.

Licenses

Like many libraries for web development, PHPDOCX comes with more than one license.

The first possibility is to use the library with an LGPL license, which covers the free version. It has somewhat limited features in comparison to the Pro one, but it includes no watermarks in the produced documents nor it has time limits.

The Pro version has greater capabilities, like the insertion of graphs and MathML constructs for scientifical documents. It also provides technical support, which may be the most compelling point for its adoption.

In conclusion, PHPDOCX is a valid tool to manage production of documents in one of the most diffused formats of the world. It also manages PDF and HTML, which guarantee interoperability with any end user’s machine.