Digital Format Conversion Tools

Convert from DOCX or HTML to EPUB, Kindle, and PDF in PHP

Introduction

Digital Format Conversion tools enable conversion from Microsoft Word (2007+) DOCX format or HTML to EPUB, Kindle and PDF in PHP.

The EPub Controller/Model examples are the most complete in this application, including basic content cleansing and setting of options specific to the EPub conversion library.

The tools are constructed from a range of Open Source elements, including:

• EPub PHP class (http://www.phpclasses.org/package/6115)
• phpMobi (https://github.com/raiju/phpMobi)
• mPDF (http://www.mpdf1.com/mpdf/)
• PHPDOCX (http://www.phpdocx.com/)
• Twitter Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/)
• A copy of the source code for these elements are available in /library

Background

I have developed this package to demonstrate, in a simple way, the conversion tools seen in https://github.com/campus-based-publishing/CBPPlatform

Application Structure

This simple application uses a basic MVC architecture. Models/Views/Controllers are found in the /application directory.

There are 4 models and 3 controllers. 3 of the models and the controllers contain the code to convert from DOCX to EPub, MOBI, and PDF.

The final model (TransformModel) contains common methods to extract HTML from a Word DOCX Document.

How It Works

The conversion process works thus:

• If a Word Document is specified as input: PHPDOCX is used to unzip and extract XML from the DOCX file
• If a Word Document is specified as input: PHPDOCX applies XSLT to the XML, which ultimately produces valid HTML
• If HTML is specified as input: The HTML is passed 'as-is' to the following stage
• At this stage, a DOMParser, third-party CSS parsers, or custom CSS, can be utilised to customise the HTML. I have opted to leave these features out to keep the code as generic as possible.
• The final HTML and other arguments (author, publisher etc) are passed to the range of conversion tools dependent on the scenario: EPub, phpMobi, and mPDF

N.B. The demonstration manuscript is stored in /application/example

TODO

• Update documentation to reflect 9 May 2012 changes onwards
• Detailed testing of HTML to formats - PDF tested (basic elements only) 15 May 2012