How to open and manipulate Word document/template in Java?

Question

I need to open a .doc/.dot/.docx/.dotx (I\'m not picky, I just want it to work) document, parse it for placeholders (or something similar), put my own data, an

Answer 1

Since a docx file is merely a zip-archive of xml files (plus any binary files for embedded objects such as images), we met that requirement by unpacking the zip file, feeding the document.xml to a template engine (we used freemarker) that does the merging for us, and then zipping the output document to get the new docx file.

The template document then is simply an ordinary docx with embedded freemarker expressions / directives, and can be edited in Word.

Since (un)zipping can be done with the JDK, and Freemarker is open source, you don't incur any licence fees, not even for word itself.

The limitation is that this approach can only emit docx or rtf files, and the output document will have the same filetype as the template. If you need to convert the document to another format (such as pdf) you'll have to solve that problem separately.