Best way to export html to Word without having MS Word installed?

Question

Is there a way to export a simple HTML page to Word (.doc format, not .docx) without having Microsoft Word installed?

Answer 1

There is an open source project called HTMLtoWord that that allows users to insert fragments of well-formed HTML (XHTML) into a Word document as formatted text.

HTMLtoWord documentation

Answer 2

Well, there are many third party tools for this. I don't know if it gets any simpler than that.

Examples:

• http://htmltortf.com/
  
• http://www.brothersoft.com/windows-html-to-word-2008-56150.html
  
• http://www.eprintdriver.com/to_word/HTML_to_Word_Doc.html

Also found a vbscribt, but I'm guessing that requires that you have word installed.

Answer 3

While it is possible to make a ".doc" Microsoft Word file, it would probably be easier and more portable to make a ".rtf" file.

Answer 4

There's a tool called JODConverter which hooks into open office to expose it's file format converters, there's versions available as a webapp (sits in tomcat) which you post to and a command line tool. I've been firing html at it and converting to .doc and pdf succesfully it's in a fairly big project, haven't gone live yet but I think I'm going to be using it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/jodconverter/

Answer 5

If you are working in Java, you can convert HTML to real docx content with code I released in docx4j 2.8.0. I say "real", because the alternative is to create an HTML altChunk, which relies on Word to do the actual conversion (when the document is first opened).

See the various samples prefixed ConvertInXHTML. The import process expects well formed XML, so you might have to tidy it first.

Answer 6

If it's just HTML, all you need to do is change the extension to .doc and word will open it as if it's a word document. However, if there are images to include or javascript to run it can get a little more complicated.