Writing Word Files From Java

[Mike London]

Hello,

Are there good solutions (mature or relatively stable) to write word documents from Java, say from a ByteArrayOutputStream?

Apache's HWPF POI project sounds like it's in it's infancy. Also, I couldn't find any examples how to use it.

OpenOffice has an API you could program to. Let OO output the word documents for you. Not sure how easy this might be.

Is anyone out there using either of the two technologies above?

If not, can you recommend a better way to go about creating Word docs from Java?

Thanks.

- mike

[Bear Bibeault]

The one time I had to do this, I used iText and rendered to RTF, which Word can read.

[Rob Spoor]

I've used POI last year to read a Word file. The results were disappointing. No idea how much it has improved since then.

[Mike London]

Thanks for your reply.

From the sounds of the Apache forum "We're really looking for somebody to lead this project ...." type of language, it doesn't sound like it's come that far.

What do you think about using OpenOffice's API and letting OpenOffice handle the dirty work?

Not sure how easy or doable this is.

-- M

[Rob Spoor]

It's probably the best solution. Unfortunately, "best" usually does not mean "easiest".

[Mike London]

OK, thanks. Appreciate your follow up.

mike

[Ulf Dittmer]

IMO, POI is OK at extracting text, but not so much at creating or altering existing files. OpenOffice can do it all, but I've found its Java API to have a steep learning curve, and consequently have yet to use it for anything serious.

For something formatted that Word can open RTF would be my choice. If you create an empty file in Word with all the formattings, and placeholders for the actual content, and then save it as RTF, you can create nicely looking documents simple by text search-and-replace. Or use iText to create RTF from scratch.

[Mike London]

I used iText a couple years ago and really liked it.

That's probably the best solution.

Has iText changed a lot lately?

Thanks.

mike

[Ulf Dittmer]

iText has been progressing steadily, although the PDF part has probably seen more attention than the RTF part.

Be aware that there's a new branch of iText (iText 5), which is fairly recent and has a different license that may require users to pay up for using it. Plus, the RTF part has been split off from the PDF part. But my impression is that v5 does not so far do much more than v2.1, so sticking to v2.1 should not be problem for the time being.

[Mike London]

great info, thank you!