Linux-based MS Office thumbnail generation

Question

I've been taken onboard to work on a PHP-based web application. One part of the application generates thumbnail images for MS Office documents on demand, and it uses MS Office + the VeryPDF docprint utility to do this. Because of this one requirement, the system is running on Windows Server 2003 + IIS.

I would prefer to have the system running on a Linux server, rather than MS, as I have far more experience in administering Linux systems than Windows and we have no other in-house technical staff.

Does anyone know a way to handle the document conversion using native Linux software? I would love something PHP native, but am willing to look outside that if necessary.

Answer 1

I have never done anything like this, so I'm just throwing an idea off the top of my head.

Have you thought about utilizing Open Office's capabilities to create thumbnail images? I know OO saves thumbnail images within a created document, so all you need to do is extract the image to display it. (This is demonstrated on the Ubuntu forums.) You could always do something sort of "hackish" where you use run a file through OpenOffice and extract the image to display a small thumbnail.

Again, I have no idea how well this will work, but it may be worth a shot.

Answer 2

To anyone else who comes across this, I have ended up going with the newer version of jodconverter. The sample code includes a basic web page that can be POSTed to using something like Pear's HTTP_Request2. A sample class (by yours truly) which uses this is mentioned in the comments in jodconverter's group on google code.