My company is looking into exporting data from our web application into familiar

Question

My company is looking into exporting data from our web application into familiar, usable formats for end users. We're evaluating producing ODT (OpenOffice.Org Writer) files and I'm looking for a library to generate them.

Our application is largely written in PHP but we also use a fair amount of Python and I'm open to making the case to use whatever language is best; it's much more important to us that we are able to produce polished files reliably and with a good degree of control of formatting.

Our main requirements are that it has the power to generate polished looking files (unlike most HTML-to-whatever-style converters), and that the files are subsequently easily editable by end users (we already provide PDFs, but some clients are requesting formats they can modify because their needs for final documentation differ).

The documents will be largely text and images, in a tabular format (essentially, questions and answers), so we will likely need support for tables.

Explanation / Answer

I would suggest the PHPOffice Project - specifically PHPWord. It is opensource and free. Despite the name PHPWord it supports a lot of formats - .doc, .ods, .rtf, .html and .pdf.

There are currently only 12 open bugs - and none of them are older than May (2014). It has fairly detailed documentation and is under active development.

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