Re: generating a microsoft word doc

[afoken]

"Modern" Word (since 2003, IIRC) uses renamed ZIP archives (*.docx, *.docm) containing a lot of XML, whereas "ancient" Word (*.doc) used a binary mess. Microsoft has documented the file format somewhere, so you should be able to generate that bunch of XML in a renamed ZIP file.

It might be a little bit easier to use an existing *.docx/*.docm file as template, extract the content XML (using something like Archive::Zip), and patch your content into it using XML::LibXML or similar. After that, create a new ZIP file and rename it to *.docx/*.docm.

Word can also read and edit HTML.

If you are on Windows and have Word installed, you may want to try Win32::OLE to open, edit and save a Word file from within perl.

I would prefer the first or second way, because OLE gets messy and unstable quite fast.

Alexander

[Athanasius]

Microsoft has documented the file format somewhere...

It’s an international standard (see Office Open XML):

ISO/IEC 29500: Information technology -- Document description and processing languages -- Office Open XML File Formats

available for free download from http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/index.html.

(The documentation of this standard — in 4 parts — currently requires 6,766 pages of PDF plus 1,559 supporting files. :-o)

Cheers,