For those of us that are not experts with object models, if you have Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word available, go into the Visual Basic Editor (Alt+F11). Now you can open the object browser window (F2) and see what you find.
If you select "Word" in the object browser, then the classes and members of that class are displayed below. For example, if you click on "Selection" in the classes column, and then "Font" in the members column, you will then see "Property Font As Font Member of Word.Selection" displayed at the bottom. Click on the "Font" link there.
Click on Word "Selection" again in the classes column, and then "PageSetup" in the members column, you will then see "Property PageSetup As PageSetup Member of word.Selection" displayed at the bottom. Click on the "PageSetup" link there.
Using the above examples, you can now formulate your Word Document from php. Here is a simple example that creates a 1 & 1/2" space for text based on the margin settings & with dark red text and an 8pt Helvetica font face:
<?php
$content = "Insert Sample Text Here\n\nThis starts a new paragraph line.";
$word= new COM("word.application") or die("Unable to create Word document");
print "Loaded Word, version {$word->Version}\n";
$word->Visible = 0;
$word->Documents->Add();
$word->Selection->PageSetup->LeftMargin = '3"';
$word->Selection->PageSetup->RightMargin = '4"';
$word->Selection->Font->Name = 'Helvetica';
$word->Selection->Font->Size = 8;
$word->Selection->Font->ColorIndex= 13; $word->Selection->TypeText("$content");
$word->Documents[1]->SaveAs("some_tst.doc");
$word->quit();
echo "done";
?>
This example (and others) worked for me with Microsoft Word 10.0 Object Library (MS Word 2002), Apache & PHP on Windows XP. Experimenting using the Visual Basic editor will yield some amazing documents from PHP as it will help you see the relationships of the objects used and give you an idea as to how to construct your code. But be prepared for an occaisional PHP.exe crash if your code is way off base.
Hope this helps!
