Read PDF and Word DOC Files Using PHP

element

Font
font-family
font-size
font-style
font-variant
font-weight
letter-spacing
line-height
text-decoration
text-align
text-indent
text-transform
white-space
word-spacing
color
Background
bg-attachment
bg-color
bg-image
bg-position
bg-repeat
Box
width
height
border-top
border-right
border-bottom
border-left
margin
padding
max-height
min-height
max-width
min-width
outline-color
outline-style
outline-width
Positioning
position
top
bottom
right
left
float
display
clear
z-index
List
list-style-image
list-style-type
list-style-position
Table
vertical-align
border-collapse
border-spacing
caption-side
empty-cells
table-layout
Effects
text-shadow
-webkit-box-shadow
border-radius
Other
overflow
cursor
visibility

Reading PDF Files

To read PDF files, you will need to install the XPDF package, which includes "pdftotext." Once you have XPDF/pdftotext installed, you run the following PHP statement to get the PDF text:

$content = shell_exec('/usr/local/bin/pdftotext '.$filename.' -'); //dash at the end to output content

 

Reading DOC Files

Like the PDF example above, you'll need to download another package. This package is called Antiword. Here's the code to grab the Word DOC content:

$content = shell_exec('/usr/local/bin/antiword '.$filename);

 The above code does NOT read DOCX files and does not (and purposely so) preserve formatting. There are other libraries that will preserve formatting but in our case, we just want to get at the text.